Archive of Our Own ^beta

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.

Chapter Text

Josephine tries to appreciate the quiet in the absence of Leliana and the Herald. After all, distractions are distractions, and for the moment, she is free.

She can write long into the night without prodding from her conscience on whether or not Leliana will return to bed. She can take Cullen to task for not settling for a low enough price for iron ore to forge swords and shields, and then in the same day teach him a trick to cure the slightly acrid smell of his hair pomade. She spends hours huddled over the workstation in Adan’s hovel, going over every figure in his ledger so that Threnn won’t thrash him in his sleep. She drinks a cup of wine with Vivienne in the evening, listens to the newest strains of gossip from the court of Orlais—she knows most of them already, but Vivienne wields her insights like a scalpel.

Of course, on the third day, when Josephine sighs and sips at her sludge-like coffee from the kitchens, and revels in the sheer quiet of the Chantry, a wild blizzard descends upon them. The winds tear the roofs off of six of the village buildings, filling them with snowdrifts. It howls long into the night, and the next, and the next. The meteorological theatrics go unappreciated.

Josephine ends up reclaiming the Chantry as a refuge—the barracks can hold the soldiers, but the shacks and huts they’ve built to house the rest of the Inquisition are too small and too cold. Cullen and his people herd everyone else in, and every scrap of cloth available becomes a blanket, including her fine, emerald-hued dressing gown from Orlais. (She catches Sera prancing about with it on, days later. She says nothing. It suits her.)

It’s good. It’s good because it takes time, will, and all the space her mind can hold to keep the peace when a hundred people need to live in the same room for a week. There’s nothing left for anything else, not even herself. They eat dried beef and hardtack from the cellars. Mother Giselle leads a daily prayer service, and Josephine unlocks her office so those unfaithful may seek refuge behind stone. It does nothing to keep the noise out, so Josephine leaves a sifter of brandy.

When the sun breaks over Haven, and the snow clouds roll away, she arranges for extra supply lines of wood, out-of-work craftsmen from nearby villages to repair and rebuild. It won’t do to have the Herald return to half their home crushed under the fist of a snowstorm. Cullen agrees, and sets half their forces to work in the service of improvements. They build taller walls to surround the perimeter. They make foundations of stone. A footprint to be reckoned with.

The Chargers rebuild the dock, persuade Josephine to wander to the very edge to test it. As she stands at the last plank, toes hanging over the side, she casts her eyes to the far edge of the lake, the false stone wall that cleaves it in two. She pictures Adaar, tall and grey, carving a hole in the ice, slipping between worlds to find a way through. A needle, connecting two planes.

The poetry doesn’t suit. She turns, trips on a loose plank, and narrowly avoids falling on her face.

The rest of the repairs are smoother, with results she finds satisfying, at least, if not perfect. Before she knows it, a month has rolled past, and late one night, Cullen taps at the door to her office.

When she beckons him in, he sets a mug of ale on her desk, holding one for himself in his broad hand. She sniffs it suspiciously.

“They’re celebrating,” Cullen says dryly. They’re means some mix of the Chargers and the Inquisition soldiers.

“The end of the repairs?” inquires Josephine, taking a sip. It tastes like hay, mud, and vinegar—the three royal flavors of Ferelden. Determined not to be beaten by it, she takes a brave gulp and motions him to sit. “Some Fereldan holiday gone unrecognized by the rest of the civilized world?”

He sits. “You trust me with your honest opinions, Ambassador?”

That makes her laugh. “I am surprised by what I like here,” she tells him. “The Fereldan lust for hard work has at least proven useful.”

She is rewarded with a small smile, curt and true. “We do our best.”

“So our walls are fit to stand?”

He shrugs “I suppose so.”

“You don’t agree.”

“Nothing is ever finished,” he tells her, and that’s something she can certainly stand behind. “But I’ll let them have a moment.”

“How benevolent.” Josephine raises her mug. He raises his in kind, and takes a drink. She rubs at a dirty spot on the handle.

He chuckles under his breath. “Morale is important.”

“I imagine that means the soldiers are drunk and having competitions to see who can stand naked in the snow longest.” Josephine raises an eyebrow over the rim of her mug. “How long would you last, Commander?”

Cullen’s lips twitch, but he maintains his stern façade. “Krem assured me no one would come down with frostbite—and you should know better. I don’t compete, in the name of not shaming each and every one of them.” He sets his mug down on her desk. “Will we hear from Redcliffe soon?” She sits back to conceal her own jolt of realization—she hasn’t thought of Redcliffe since waking this morning. Not of how negotiations go, or what strange situation Adaar has managed herself into, or if Leliana remembers to eat, sleep, or some combination of the two. The guilt sharpens its teeth against her insides. “I hope,” she admits. “At least we’ve made room for newcomers.”

Cullen only nods; the newcomers will not be his brethren, at least not yet. He looks like he holds an entire conversation on the tip of his tongue, then presses it down, farther than Josephine can reach, and takes a drink instead.

But before Josephine can break the silence, he does. “What will it be like,” he asks, “when they return?”

It’s a careful question, even in its bluntness. He’s not speaking about the rebel mages.

“Perhaps the Herald will be more occupied,” Josephine allows.

Cullen gives her a look across the desk. For a man covered in fur and steel, his past as a hardened soldier only appears in flickers—the precise tone of his raised voice, his posture as he turns to make a point during a war council meeting. And now, in this wary look he casts across the space between them. Like an old man resigned to an oncoming storm.

“Occupied with what, exactly?” he asks, and Josephine had never put it past Cullen to be the one to come up with incisive questions. After all, he rarely surprises her.

Josephine says, “I thought you and the Herald were—” Allied. “On the same page,” she finishes.

He takes a pull of his ale; it reminds Josephine to drink hers. “We are,” he says, “on defense at home.”

Ah. At home, and nowhere else. It’s still closer than either she or Leliana have made it.

“It sounds like you don’t know what to think of her,” Josephine offers.

He nods. “Do you?” he asks dryly, and she nearly smiles.

‘

“I find her incredibly intelligent,” Josephine begins.

“She is,” Cullen agrees. “I’ve never met someone with such an understanding of… land.” The sentence could so easily seem a flat mockery, but in Cullen’s mouth it’s reverent. “Space,” he adds. “Movement. How the width of a mountain correlates to wind cover. The quickness of ground troops crossing a snow plain depending on the weather.” He takes another drink. “She was in Haven for less than a day before she cornered me and told me there were sixteen ways in and out of here that she could find, and we needed to rearrange the rota as quickly as possible.”

Josephine’s lips twitch, now, and she sips the rotten hay-water.

“We have better maps,” Cullen continues. “We get where we need to go more efficiently. Our caravan lines are safer.” He nods at her. “Road repairs. Functional refugee camps. All of that is—done.”

It’s important—they are details usually left till the end, when the conflict is over and everyone has lost interest in the well-being of the people and the country. They are solved when they prove inconvenient. No one can argue Adaar’s understanding and knowledge surrounding the quieter problems (that’s just the phrase, Josephine thinks, the quieter problems, less bloody and steel-filled and ringing with the screams of demons) is a disadvantage.

Josephine examines his face carefully as he searches for words.

“Do you remember when the clerics denounced her?” he asks ruefully, thumb rubbing the rim of the mug.

Ah, yes. All Val Royeaux aflutter after the incident with the Templars and the Chantry mother in the market square. The city hummed with conflict, and cleric after cleric denounced Adaar in public, using whatever they could find as leverage—she was a Qunari, a mercenary, a bandit, a heretic of the worst kind. The printing presses ran hot with scrawled images of her face. Look what crawled out of the Fade.

Josephine wanted to bolster the support of the clerics speaking in their favor, what few of them were left; Cullen sought a show of power at the Grand Cathedral. Leliana maintained those clerics survived the Conclave only because they were too unworthy to be present, and thought of exploiting those weaknesses, those wagging tongues and puffed-out chests.

Having heard all the arguments, Adaar shrugged. “People still join the Inquisition,” she said. “They won’t stop coming.” And instead of going with at least one plan, nothing was done at all.

(That strictly wasn’t true: Leliana silenced the loudest of them all anyway, and Josephine still contacted the smaller voices speaking the truth. It wasn’t betraying direct orders, she reasoned, because no orders had been given. There was only an absence. She could argue it in any court, and it would stand. What else does one do in the face of apathy?)

“Of course I remember,” Josephine says.

Cullen sits back in his chair. “She found me after,” he tells her, “and asked if I was disappointed. I told her—of course I was. Even I can see we need more friends than enemies.”

Something drips through the roof and stains a letter on Josephine’s desk as perfect punctuation. She moves her mug of ale on top of the parchment to catch the droplets. He chuckles.

“What was her response?” she asks curiously.

“She said—Cullen, break your back all you like, but they still have to do the work for themselves.” He takes a drink. “It’s better this way. They’ll find out sooner or later.”

He says it with a not entirely inappropriate touch of mocking. But there’s a lack of conviction, of any real heat. It surprises her, this little glimpse into Cullen’s uncertainties. Behind the veneer, he wavers. The possibility that her words, motive aside, might be true is not something he knows what to do with.

“Can you imagine if she felt the same way about the war?” he asks suddenly, bidden by horror.

“She cares about the mage-templar feud,” Josephine points out, then balks. A hair too close to defending her.

He doesn’t notice. “And thank the Maker,” says Cullen. Of course—what if Adaar didn’t?

It’s a question neither is willing to speak aloud. There will be other feuds, other conflicts in the long course of the journey—plenty for her to find unworthy. Count a blessing when it happens.

Cullen takes a breath. “We have roads, refugees, and a distaste for ways in the heart of Orlais. Everything else,” he says, and doesn’t go on. He exhales, long and slow.

It lies there. Everything else needed of a leader. Everything else in need of a decision—not a mind that makes a decision, but a vision. A vision beyond what the three of them and Cassandra can connive late at night, hunkered around a map of the world by candlelight.

“Everything else,” she agrees, and it becomes its own toast. Everything else sits, waits, rots.

~~~

The blizzard makes work enthralling. What it means is by the time a missive arrives from Redcliffe saying the Herald returns, Josephine has little time to prepare herself.

And she prepares in vain. When they return, Adaar’s face carves itself into a haggard kind of sadness. She shuts herself inside her hovel for an entire day under the premise of needing rest.

(Leliana does not arrive with her—some unfinished business with their new charges, helping assure them across the plains and into the mountains. Haven, now a home for mage freedom. At least that will please her.)

Cullen coaxes her out to tour the repairs, to go through the damage done. She watches them from Threnn’s station outside the Chantry while confirming their stock of wheat for the next month.

They walk the walls, Cullen stopping her every few feet to point out a detail—a new foundation, a patch in the wall, some descriptor of the storm. Adaar pays close attention. (Josephine can tell, even from the distance. Adaar always notices everything. Her eye never wavers. She takes it all in, makes note of every inch.) But every line of her body is different. Harder, sharper, as though broken sloppily and welded back together. She has survived some trial, but just barely.

She watches them stand before the gate for a long while. Adaar reaches up to touch the mighty blackened hinge of the gate, makes a fist, taps the iron. She’s talking, for the first time. Cullen tilts his head. He listens to every word.

He’s fond of her, Josephine realizes. Cullen’s face takes on a particular dullness when he’s hearing a voice, but not listening. An immovable stoniness. Despite their building worries, their grousing conversation only a few nights before, he’s fond of her. Perhaps in the way those who wield sword and shield naturally do for farmers, Chantry sisters, or cartographers. Shelter for those without. It would explain how Adaar finds common ground with him, with Cassandra.

But the answer is too simple for any of the parties involved. After, Adaar disappears inside her hovel for another day, and another.

When business cannot wait, Josephine knocks on her door as the moon rises above the mountains. Adaar does not answer, and Josephine picks the lock.

Leliana insisted on teaching her how, once, a handful of years ago. Josephine had jested it was only to break Leliana out of whatever trouble she might find herself in, be it the dungeons of the Empress’ prison or a mishap with a broom closet.

Josephine expected dry laughter, a pointed barb in response, but Leliana only shook her head and said, I’ll never need you for that.

She’s not particularly skilled, but she’s determined, and the Herald’s hovel is old, the door tired, the lock flimsy.

When she enters, Adaar bolts upright in bed—a bed, Josephine notes with a surge of pride, that now accommodates her endless legs.

“I don’t mean to be rude,” Josephine says, shutting the door behind her.

Adaar barely notices her and motions to a chair. “Be rude,” she says simply. She adjusts, sitting at the edge of the bed, arms resting on her knees.

Josephine draws up the woebegone wooden chair that sits at Adaar’s desk. (Another project—if this is what the Herald needs, she needs something better.) “I read your report on the mages at Redcliffe,” Josephine says. “It is incomplete.”

Adaar brushes a stray lock of black hair behind her ear, rubs at the tip of one of her horns, and sighs with all the finality of a heavy decision. “Then it will remain incomplete.”

“It’s less than a page,” Josephine says slowly, as though perhaps Adaar just doesn’t understand. “The important piece—the negotiations with the mages—is three sentences.”

“The Inquisition needs a concise hand,” Adaar answers.

“The rebel mages of Redcliffe contacted and chose a Tevinter magister, Gereon Alexius, as their leader,” Josephine recites. “We investigated him with the help of an allied Tevinter mage, and we found Alexius guilty of a number of war crimes. We appointed a new liaison for the mages, took them on as our allies, and returned to Haven.”

Adaar does her the credit of a raised eyebrow, and says, “Quite the memory on you.”

“There’s not much value in memory,” Josephine replies, “when the task in question is shorter than a nursery rhyme.” She holds out a hand. “Your spectacles. May I?”

She cocks her head in response; Josephine opens and closes her fingers. “I cannot talk to you through a dust storm.”

A muscle jumps along her grey cheek. One of those near-smiles. Adaar hands over her spectacles and Josephine draws a silk handkerchief from her pocket. She holds them up to the light; the glass is foggy with detritus. “How do you see anything?”

“Just fine, thank you.” Adaar rubs at the bridge of her nose.

The bronze rims of the spectacles are fine but hardy—well made by a skilled hand, one that understands delicacy and function. The glass has been replaced several times, and she takes care to shine the bronze.

“Who made these for you?” she asks curiously. Their maker welded an opal, only a little larger than a pinhead, inside the right stem. Where it would always touch her temple, resting against her grey skin.

Adaar says, “My father,” and holds out her hand for the return. Josephine gives them over, watches her slide them back up her nose.

The answer, curt and quiet, makes Josephine’s heart ache. She thinks of Adaar’s cheap, fennec-lined coat hanging over the chair, the worn boots, her tired leather gloves. The spectacles fit her face perfectly—Josephine imagines they are her oldest possession, the most treasured, the most useful. A love expressed by familiarity: how well one must know a face in order to craft an artifact to fit upon perfectly.

But the feelings rise for no reason. They are here for business.

“The report,” Josephine begins, and Adaar closes her eyes.

“Isn’t it up to you,” she asks, “to add the ribbons and the lace?”

Josephine straightens in her chair and narrows her gaze. “Oh?” she asks. “What a grand task. I must light a candle in the chapel to thank Andraste for the opportunity. Why is this so sparse?”

She doesn’t answer. Josephine tries again. “Was there failure of some kind? It’s inevitable, of course, but we are still whole. Are you dissatisfied with the alliance? Do you regret conferring with the rebel mages?”

Adaar shakes her head.

One last attempt. “Is it Sister Leliana?” she asks. “Did you two—have conflict?”

The lack of answer serves—there is the failure, there is the root. Her stomach sinks. Adaar still says nothing, but she looks beyond her. Just as she used to: over the top of her head, refusing to meet her eyes.

Josephine can feel her fingers trying to clench into fists, and smooths her skirts instead.

“Herald?” she presses, trying not to sound as tired as she feels.

“Function,” Adaar says, finally. She still doesn’t look at her. “That’s what I can provide.”

“But I do not provide indulgence.” Josephine’s tone is flat. “You mistake me, Herald. This is not functional. It does not have legs—not even feet—to stand on. You must try again.”

Her jaw clenches, a muscled tendon in her neck goes tense, and she casts her eyes to the windowpane.

Josephine certainly gets the impression that Adaar is… mousy, for a Qunari, with her lanky build, a form toned from climbing up mountains and running around plains, instead of swinging a battle-axe. But she cuts a fine figure in the candlelight, her silhouette tall and noble. All that hair, wasted—bound up in a knotted mess, or plaited like a girl’s. A jawline sharp enough to cut, should Josephine run a finger along its line.

Freckles, she notices, for the first time. Not like Leliana’s, which gather brightly across her nose and cheeks in the summertime. These scatter carefully across her face, as though each soft spot was debated on before being touched to her skin. Mapped, Leliana would say, completely straight-faced, were she here.

In moments like this, Josephine can see the woman they’re supposed to follow. These moments of hard stubbornness, where her will refuses to budge. Her small, strange strength. The first inklings of rage, if she allowed herself to be pushed. Adaar isn’t led by anyone but herself. It’s a trait Josephine has always found in the worthwhile leaders she’s served. The unworthy have no gumption, pushed to and fro by manipulative advisors and players with a better sense of the game. At least Adaar, in every sense, does not lack spine.

But everything else, echoes a suspicious voice in the back of her mind. That’s what’s worst of all, she realizes. The untouched potential.

You could be so much, Josephine wants to say. Instead, she gives a little shake of her head, and repeats, “You must try again,” before rising out of the chair. Adaar remains silent, and Josephine leaves without a sound.

She casts one look back to the hovel as she pads up the well-worn path through the snow. She hopes to see another little candlelight blossom behind the darkness of the window. Or perhaps watch it move from one end to the other, from bed to desk. One glimmer of hope, just for Josephine’s vanity, that anything she’s said has an impact.

But nothing changes. And so she goes back to the Chantry.

~~~

Cassandra delivers the mages from Redcliffe. Leliana walks invisible among them.

That night, Josephine goes to the dock, wrapped in her coat, and waits.

It’s not a fair play on her part. It will put Leliana on edge—for Josephine to know her routine so thoroughly she can make use of it, can make her do something she has no desire to do. Even a task as simple as talking.

Josephine stands in the cold, and waits, and waits, until the crunch of boots in the snowfall comes to a stop on the shore.

“Is this your idea of borderlands?” Leliana asks suspiciously from the shore.

“Absolutely,” Josephine says, her breath making puffs of white in the air. “Think of this as a negotiation between warring countries.”

A pause before she hears Leliana sigh, “I am not at war with you.”

“You’re not,” Josephine agrees, “but for now, it will serve.” She does not turn to look at Leliana over her shoulder for fear of making her take flight. “I assume you are well.”

“Redcliffe’s castle has a number of incredible secret passageways,” Leliana answers. “You know how thrilling I find ancient architecture.”

It is madness, she thinks, to find such a deadpan tone a calm settling in her bones. “For what purpose?” inquires Josephine.

“To take their magister hostage,” she answers. “It was simple enough. He requested an audience with Adaar, and we used the opportunity for infiltration.” Josephine listens to her press the tip of her bow into the snow, the sound of her gloves running along the string as she readies it. “The arl of Redcliffe holds the prisoner on our behalf for now. The mage leader agreed to ally with us—Adaar offered them the full berth of our resources. And then we came home.”

Josephine blinks. None of it makes sense. “That can’t be all.”

A long pause. Too long.

“Leliana,” she presses.

“There was a moment,” Leliana says, pausing to cough, “where she disappeared.”

Josephine inhales, her eyes widening.

“It was fine,” she adds hastily. “It was fine, Josie, nothing—”

Josephine whirls to face her, all pretense of care forgotten. Leliana leans against a boulder. “She what?”

“She disappeared.” Leliana folds her arms and gives Josephine a sharp glance. A look that dares. Test me, it says. You weren’t even there.

Josephine is all too ready. “Explain yourself,” she demands, striding to the shore-edge of the dock. She refuses to climb down in the name of equal footing; she will not stare up at Leliana for this conversation.

“The magister had a spell prepared.” If she weren’t wearing gloves, Josephine’s sure Leliana would be inspecting her fingernails, plucking stray threads from her clothes. Anything to give the impression of apathy. “She and our mage—Lord Dorian, if you haven’t met him yet—disappeared for, oh, a minute? Two?”

“You don’t know how long she was gone?” snaps Josephine.

“Ask Cassandra.” Leliana waves a hand. “I’m sure she marked it to the second. They reappeared; it hardly matters.”

Josephine rubs the bridge of her nose. “Your callous act does not play well with me,” she informs her. “It is your duty, and you know it.”

“My duty?” Leliana inquires, her voice rising. “The Herald demands we let her take care of herself. I am following orders, or being sensible, or some combination of the two.”

“You are petty.” Josephine stands on the point firmly, and knows she’s right when Leliana only sighs at it being out in the open.

“Lord Dorian was fine,” Leliana says. “He was fine, and she seemed well enough.”

There’s a hesitance there, somewhere in the latter half of her thoughts. Josephine waits for her to notice, hears her exhale. “He wasn’t shaken. They seemed to have—an agreement.” Josephine raises an eyebrow, and Leliana shrugs. “He did not brief me on what happened. He said she had taken on the burden.”

It is here Josephine makes a mistake. “What happened after? What did you say?”

“What did I say?” Leliana sounds surprised, now. “I spoke to her twice the entirety of the time we were there. We did not communicate.”

“Something is wrong with Adaar,” Josephine says.

“More than usual?”

“She doesn’t eat.” Josephine mulls over the details in her head. “She won’t come out, not even to climb the mountains."

“Perhaps she’s found a book to read.” Leliana’s voice is curt.

Josephine holds up a hand. “Leliana.”

“Or some angle of the lake she hasn’t yet put to paper,” she continues.

“Adaar indicated it was because of you.”

The silence between them curls into a fist.

“I did nothing,” answers Leliana flatly. “I went out of my way to avoid her, as you can guess.”

Josephine gestures back to their camps. “She said—you.” Or didn’t say, to be precise, but that doesn’t matter now. The intent was clear: the actions of the Nightingale had done this.

She doesn’t know what happened at Redcliffe. Josephine reads people as a trade and a craft but Leliana and Adaar share a stoniness she can’t penetrate. The truth is something happened, something must have occurred, something bleak enough to break Adaar and disruptive enough to make Leliana play-act like this.

(Unless—she doesn’t know. Unless it is only Adaar, engaging in in a lie for the purpose of sabotage and pettiness. But the idea is ridiculous. She does not like me. It is a problem. Her words, truthful and dry.)

“What happened?” she asks again, quieter this time.

“I don’t know,” Leliana answers, in a tone tired as the grave. “I spoke to her to arrange the infiltration, and when she asked me to help Cassandra guide the mages to Haven. That is all.” A pause. “I know when I hurt someone, Josie. I’m not a child.”

But you don’t. Josephine bites her tongue. You don’t know your own sharpness.

“How much longer do you want to press this?” she continues. “If she’s—affected, I don’t know why. Perhaps you can ask Cassandra in the morning.”

Josephine knows a concession when she sees it. “Cassandra believes in her,” she agrees.

“That’s because Cassandra enjoys playing knight-and-maiden.” Leliana raises her eyebrow. “And the Inquisition provides endless rounds of the game.”

Josephine thinks back to Cassandra in the courtyard, grumbling about the effectiveness of road repairs, and knows—again—that Leliana is wrong. But she shrugs. “Perhaps.” She will not pretend to agree to smooth over the debate.

Leliana sighs again. There’s no sound Josephine detests more. She takes a deep breath.

“Yes?” she nudges, gently.

“I thought she seemed—” Leliana mulls the words. “Listless.”

“Listless.” The word hangs in the air, like one of Josephine’s breaths given light and life. It pinpoints the failing. Listless is a word neither would ever, ever use to describe her—Adaar sits at her desk for long hours to page through tomes and scrawl new maps, spends hours walking the landscape to learn the bends of rivers, but she’s never stagnant. She’s never idle.

Josephine thinks of how quietly Adaar sat on that bed, how she didn’t move in the flickering light of the candle, and how silent that cabin seemed as she walked away from it. How she looked at nothing. How unnaturally still.

None of it needs to be said aloud—both of them know it, at the same time, in the same breath.

Leliana slides her bow to her back. “Come down,” she says. “I am weary, and would like to sleep.”

What it means is I am weary, I want you, but not your voice.

Josephine looks at Leliana’s emotionless face, a face that asks for nothing, and sighs. Wordlessly, she plods down the steps, until Leliana can catch her around the waist and lift her to the ground. She does not let go.

Josephine presses her face against her. “You are a misery,” she mutters into the cold chainmail.

Leliana kisses the top of her head. The motion sends a flurry of bashful heat all the way to her toes. Positively shameful. But Leliana does not usually display small kindnesses, little affections. Despite her growing unease about their conversations upon their return, despite her guilt over what she said to make them part, Josephine has missed her. It did not—it did not occur to Josephine she herself could be missed. She lets her wrap an arm around her shoulders and guide her up the path.

But Leliana leaves her at the doors of the Chantry. She unwinds her arms from around her and goes back off into the night. It is her kind of tenderness—if Josephine makes it safely to her bed, perhaps sometime tonight Leliana will permit herself to rest. It occurs to her they did not speak of their last conversation, only launched forward into new fire.

Josephine chooses to ignore the auspiciousness of the next sign: she dreams of the sea. There are old legends of Antivan princesses, left shipwrecked on far-off islands for decades, until they become pillars of coral staring out at the shoreline. In the dream, Josephine is not the maiden but the sinking ship—a slow and inexorable decline to the bottom, watching a figure stare at the horizon, at a line from which nothing will emerge. She wakes with the smell of salt on her hands, alone.

~~~

The unthinkable happens: Adaar calls a meeting of the war council.

Cullen, Josephine, and Leliana typically decide when enough issues lie in need of decision-making that they should all come together in congress at the war table. The meetings are infrequent, which makes them longer than they should be, which means Adaar avoids them at all costs.

Cullen usually rumbles off to find her, or Leliana bribes an agent, or Josephine sends Sera. (Varric, bored to tears in this desolate mountain valley, has a running pool of who can find Adaar the fastest. Josephine likes to win even more than she likes to gamble, and Sera has by far the quickest rate of return.)

But no: in the morning, when Josephine opens her office door, a scrap of paper lies on her desk. The handwriting swoops perfectly across the page: an unbearably clean and neat script. Not a drop of ink wasted. It says:

Meeting, noon.

—H. A.

“Did someone die?” Minaeve pages through a monstrously large book in the corner.

“What?” Josephine asks, bleary.

“Your face.” Minaeve motions to her own with an open hand. “Did someone die?”

Josephine just shakes her head and sits.

A few hours later, they gather. Leliana looks out the window, her back to the table. Josephine and Cullen stare at each other. Adaar is nowhere to be seen. A joke, perhaps? From Varric’s pen. But no—that was Adaar’s writing. The evidence exists all over the map between them.

The door opens—she enters, swiftly shutting the door behind her. She takes her place at the head of the table without hesitation.

“Herald,” says Cullen, a bow of his head and his hand to his chest. Leliana does not turn. Josephine only nods, clutching her tablet, quill in hand, and ready.

“I apologize for my absence,” she says, although she doesn’t specify which. Josephine suspects it’s not the handful of minutes they stood here alone, but for the past few weeks. But her tone is too firm to tell.

“I only have one item of business,” Adaar continues, her voice clear as a bell. “We need to move.”

Complete and utter silence, only parted by the sound of Leliana looking over her shoulder.

“Do you mean—where on the table, Herald?” Cullen asks, his voice uncertain. He even picks up one of his pieces between his thumb and forefinger. The deliberate misunderstanding is at least wholehearted. Adaar gives him a look as precise as a dagger. They know exactly what she means.

“The Inquisition,” their Herald clarifies. “We need to move our operations.”

A pause, only long enough to draw breath.

“That is impossible.” Cullen cannot disguise how taken aback he is.

“It’s not,” says Adaar. “It needs to be done. The sooner the better.”

“Why, precisely?” asks Josephine. “We just became established here. I finalized the loan of the land two weeks before you left for Redcliffe.”

“It’s not defensible enough,” Adaar tells her.

“It’s fine,” Cullen corrects, firm as a fist. “We are as prepared as we can be with the soldiers we have. New pilgrims join nearly every day. If you want me to recruit—”

“I don’t want to recruit anymore soldiers.” Adaar’s tone is surprisingly calm. “I want to move somewhere smarter. This is a spot for a mountain village, not a headquartered military operation. Redcliffe—“ She pauses to articulate a thought. “A place like Redcliffe. Where the land works with us, not against us.”

“The mountains—” Josephine begins, but Adaar gives a tense shake of her head.

“If we were atop a mountain,” she says, “it would be a different story. The valley gives us nothing, not even secrecy.”

They all stare at her. She leans heavy on her left hand—it’s aching her again, bound up in its bandages. “I understand it will take time,” explains Adaar. “I don’t expect it to happen tomorrow. In a month or two, perhaps. But we should begin preparing now.” She looks at Josephine. “We will find better, and you can secure it.”

“Herald,” Josephine says, plainly as she can, “we have no allies. It was by luck alone we landed here.” Luck, and a few well-placed threats of Cassandra’s fortitude in battle.

Adaar shrugs—shrugs, as though they merely argue the price of a flour sack. “Then let’s begin spinning the wheel.”

“We allied with the mages less than a week ago.” Leliana’s voice surprises Josephine with how calm and even it rises from the window. “Not only that, but we gave them autonomy. No one is rushing to be our friend.”

“I sent Scout Harding to Therinfal Redoubt this morning.” Adaar moves one of Leliana’s pieces to the fortress. Leliana watches the movements of her fingers like a hawk ready to strike. “If they still wish it, I can attend them.”

“You wish to bring them to peace,” Josephine says, and her own voice sounds far from her ears. “You plan to make the conflict stop, and then Thedas will trip over itself in its rush to become our ally.”

Leliana says, “You sent my agent without consulting me.”

Adaar moves on. “We’ve gone over this—it’s the only thing that makes sense.” Josephine opens her mouth and Adaar holds up a hand. “Ambassador. Until we bring them together, we’ve only chosen sides in a war. Nothing more.”

The silence lingers. In the silence, Leliana says, “You sent Harding.”

“I did.” Adaar does not look apologetic. “She went to survey the landscape. We move quickly.”

“Herald,” tries Josephine, reeling from the way Adaar has thrown all the work of the past few months to the floor, “why this change of mind?”

“What about proximity to the Breach?” Cullen asks suddenly, jerking his head to the east.

Adaar nods. “We have the mages now. When it closes, we will no longer need to be its neighbor.”

“When the Breach closes,” Leliana says, calmly, quietly, with the utmost care, “we will no longer need you.”

Nobody flinches, not even Adaar. It takes all Josephine’s will to keep her face smooth and emotionless. The silence winds tight as a winch. Nobody knows how to look at, because it’s impossible to tell who will shatter first. Adaar leans on her hands, glancing at Leliana, and Leliana regards her with the air of a duchess whose caught a servant stealing the server.

Adaar inhales, the brink of a sigh, and says, “You will.”

Josephine knows, with complete certainty, the void this information begins to fill. “Herald,” she says quickly, setting her tablet down on the table, “what happened in Redcliffe?”

They ignore her. “You do not want this,” Leliana says, as though she hasn’t heard anything anyone’s said. “I don’t blame you. It’s not what I would choose.”

“That’s not the point,” Adaar says.

Leliana sighs—gently, a play of sympathy. “This is broken, Herald. It is a problem.”

“It’s not broken.” Adaar takes a long look at the map. “It’s different.” The quality of the air around her takes on a heaviness, a woman looking over the edge of a high, high cliff. She reaches out and taps where Haven rests on the map. “I’m making it different,” she says.

It’s a vow.

“How?” Leliana is the first to ask. “Will you take a new and vested interest in the many arms of the Inquisition? Will you apply yourself towards our longevity, as opposed to mere survival? Or will you continue to cower?” The words are like the flat of a knife pressed on flesh. “Will you find yourself caring, more than an hour a day, about the future of these people?”

Adaar’s nostrils flare. “I--”

“You care for your maps.” Leliana’s voice drips with a stately, soft kindness. Listening to it long enough will make Josephine’s ears bleed. “Your books. You care for the challenge of engineering. Problems without priority—problems we have years to solve.” Cullen makes a noise to interrupt, but Leliana pays no attention. “This is not a happy marriage. If we continue—“

“Sister Leliana,” Josephine interrupts.

“If we continue,” Leliana goes on, her eyes flashing, “we will run the Inquisition into ruin.” Not even she can help the sneer, small and cutting, forming on her face. “But—I suppose at least it will be accurately mapped, from smoking crater to smoking crater.”

Cullen stares, open-faced as a cow, with nothing to say. One of his fists curls tight the pommel of his sword side—although whether it is out of protection or his own unwilling agreement with Leliana’s statements is impossible to say. Josephine would wager both—were Cullen more plainly aligned, he would not be so quickly bullied into quiet.

But he does not matter, not right now. Just the two warring parties in front of her.

Adaar stands perfectly still. It’s fascinating. She does not buckle under Leliana’s words, only continues to meet her eyes. There’s no anger there, no animosity. But there’s an iron there Leliana can’t touch or budge.

Cullen’s miffed impersonation of her words comes flying back to her. Let them see for themselves.

And Leliana—Leliana stands as confident as a cat, a woman cleaning the blood off her knife. A fresh kill, easier than expected. It took only a handful of moments for she and Adaar to slash the Inquisition to ribbons between them. How pleased Leliana must be with herself, tall and situated with the full weight of her own righteousness.

At her worst, if Josephine’s to be honest. But love both, she thinks, and speaks a lifeline into the silence. “Herald,” she murmurs, as solidly as she can manage, “tell us what happened at Redcliffe.”

Perhaps Adaar did not hear the question before. Now she raises up, and Josephine must bear the weight of her gaze. It is a heavy thing, to be searched by those eyes.

“Why?” she asks.

The answer is simple. “You are making this different,” Josephine says. “Tell us what happened.”

A pause. “You will not believe me.” It’s the first time Adaar’s faltered since she walked in the room. Her voice shifts a little on the last word, and her eyes drop back down to the map.

It is Cullen, somehow, who fixes it. “You hold a model of the world’s end in your hand,” he says, dry as bone. His hands shift to rest on the pommel of his sword, a ready stance. What a queer way to think of the tool lying ready in her palm. “We are beyond you won’t believe me.”

She considers this. “Bring Dorian,” she says, finally. “He will corroborate my story.”

“Herald. We don’t need him.” Josephine waves a hand. “But you demand much. Tell us what happened. Tell us what changed, so we may change with you.”

Adaar shifts from foot to foot. She watches her words connect in Adaar’s eyes—realizes their mistake. She wanted a Herald with vision, and now the Herald sees. A piece of advice she’s given to countless would-be diplomats rings in her ears: the thing you should fear most is the moment when you get exactly what you want.

Adaar exhales, braces her hands on the table again. “Everything,” she says, before cracking their world into pieces, a fist meeting an eggshell.

She weaves the tale just as Josephine would expect—without theatrics, a precise attention to detail. Waking with Dorian in Redcliffe’s musty bowels. The tangled journey through the castle, an exploration in time. The red lyrium clawing its way out of the walls. Venatori, everywhere.

“It took time,” Adaar says, looking across the table, “but we discovered it had been a year.”

“Since—“ Cullen questions, and she nods.

“Since I disappeared.” She holds out her left hand, wrapped in linen bandage. “A year without this.”

Because that’s what she means, truly, when she says you need me. They need that ancient magic, lying in wait in her hand.

With a solemnity that seems royal to Josephine, Adaar casts her gaze over the map once more and tells them the future. “Celene falls victim to assassination,” she says, “and the south falls.”

“Falls to who?” Leliana asks curtly.

“They called him the Elder One.” Adaar folds her arms. “I don’t know what he was. Dorian didn’t either. But it wasn’t for lack of trying.”

Josephine cocks her head.

“We traveled through the fortress room by room,” Adaar says. “I looked through every desk, every bookshelf. To find evidence of how we got here—how it all fell apart so quickly. A year is—a year is nothing.” The vehemence of the word chills the room. “In a year, the entire south is held hostage by the Venatori. In a year, there’s no more sky.” They sit with this a moment, frozen with wonder. “The Breach eats the Veil, and the sun, and all beyond it. In a year—”

She slows into a stop, her eyes plainly seeing something beyond the room. Almost as though she waits for permission.

It’s Cullen who asks, “What happens to our forces?” His tone firm, prodding, but gentle. He’s unafraid of the answer.

It’s enough for Adaar to go on. “Within a few months, the Inquisition shatters. Grinds itself into nothingness against Redcliffe’s walls. You manage three tries. You fail each time. In a year—“ She halts again, but this time it’s to muster herself, to struggle with her own frustration, an anger Josephine has never seen from her before. Her will, winding and unwinding within her. A scream of rage, held back. It’s all held in that pause. “In a year,” she finishes, “there’s no resistance.”

Josephine does not consider any of them faint of heart, least of all herself. They stand unafraid in the face of complete uncertainty each day. Every morning, Josephine makes a habit of going outside to look at the breach, a manifestation of tangled hunger and pride lurking over them. She doesn’t fear it. She doesn’t fear the future, the blackest of possibilities, the churn of time’s wheel.

She doesn’t. But she can be shocked. The room fills with it—a cowed disbelief. Even Leliana blinks, turns to reconsider the window.

It’s a blow to their pride. Josephine thinks of the foundations they spent the last month repairing. Feeble dreams of longevity. It lives in the spaces between them—every step a victory, they say. Every new contract, every new recruit, every inch of civility restored in Thedas. It counts because it must.

But it doesn’t even take a year for the enemy to crush the Inquisition under its heel. All their hubris, useless as dust.

Adaar takes a breath, and pushes on. “I want to give us more than three chances,” she says. “I want to give us six. Ten. With the way things stand now—three is an act of genius and generosity from the gods.” She looks directly at Josephine and Cullen as she says it, and Josephine nearly takes a step back. It occurs to her even now they are missing more pieces of the story. Only one veil has disappeared.

She knows what happened to us, Josephine thinks. All of them, standing around the table. All of them—gone.

It tolls in her heart like a graveyard bell, enough to make her gently touch the edge of the table for balance. Adaar knows it, carries it. More boundaries in the earth only she can see. More paths into a future world where the lines redraw themselves, day after day, in accordance with an ever-changing universe. A sign the world still works. Her words rattle and echo in Josephine’s brain. A world made to change.

Perhaps one day she will speak it into existence. But for now, Adaar carries it alone. Out of mercy. These details have no use, no function. And Josephine is unashamed to find herself grateful.

Adaar points to Haven on the map. “It starts with us,” she says. “It starts with finding a better place. Josephine—how long will it take Solas to understand how to close to the Breach?”

“Cassandra said he needs a few weeks.” Her voice is quiet. “He works day and night. The arrival of the mages will help.”

“Good. Time enough to hear back from Therinfal Redoubt,” Adaar agrees. “And then—“

“Herald.” Leliana’s voice is like iron. “Your solution is drastic. Why not build upon what we already have? Why not make this place what you dream of?” She looks to the map and waves a hand. “Where do you expect us to go?”

A true question. Adaar glances down, shrugs.

“I’ll find a place,” she says. As simply as one says, I’ll hang the wash.

Cullen makes a choked noise despite himself; Josephine can’t blame him.

“In-between trips to the Hinterlands to mark better paths for the goat herders?” Leliana turns away from her to regard the rest of the advisors. “Our charter says heed the Inquisitor, but we have none. Instead, we heed collaboration.” She crosses her arms. “I say—no.”

Adaar doesn’t even look up from the table. “You have that right.”

Leliana ignores her. “We must press beyond our own fears,” she says, and the clipped intention is plainly read. Adaar’s face betrays nothing. “I think we want to hide. I think we want to turn and run.”

“If I wanted that, we would leave today,” Adaar says dryly.

“How will the Ambassador explain this to our allies, who trust this is the seat of our power? Will we be crossing oceans? Where is safe enough in a world torn apart by rifts and demons?” A tirade from Leliana is unusual, but she commits to them with a gravity and precision Josephine can only admire.

Cullen makes a noise of agreement under his breath. Adaar glances his way.

“You’re right,” he says simply, “but the effort required—it will take time, Herald. We will need perfection.”

“I don’t disagree,” Adaar reassures. “I will deliver. And I don’t doubt the Ambassador’s ability to lead our allies to the same conclusion.”

It’s true. Josephine’s convinced them of harder concepts—like a Qunari woman being personally blessed by Andraste.

“How do we know,” Leliana says, “when we arrive at this new place—this place, you say, where we will suddenly be granted parlay in the future—you won’t find somewhere better?” She delivers a hard look in Adaar’s direction. “Or will we dash from dwelling to dwelling, looking for a deeper hole to hide in?”

A silence. The gauntlet is thrown.

“If we stay here,” says Adaar, solemn and true, “you dangle all our hope on one thread.”

“No need to be nervous.” Leliana waves a hand. “I can’t imagine you’re the thread.”

It’s a mistake. They all look at her hand.

“What say you?” Adaar says. She looks to Cullen. He shrugs, uncertain.

“Soldiers march where you command them to march,” is all he says, completely unhelpful. “Or they’ll stand.”

She turns her stare on Josephine; Josephine looks to the map.

“I need more than this, Herald,” she says. “The commander is correct—we need perfection. Yet I…” She trails off, tapping her chin with a finger. “Our strategy must be for the future. I do not see that future here at Haven.”

It’s true. Saying it aloud makes the thought—a thought she’s had since they arrived at Haven, made plain.

Adaar does not ask Leliana what she thinks, if only because she’s already made it plain. Cassandra gives one shake of her head when Adaar looks to her—Cassandra does not command their forces, or any other engine of their power.

“A yea, a nay, and one holds the middle.” Adaar adjusts her spectacles. “We are undecided.”

“Your vote, Herald,” Josephine says. She can feel the cold radiating from Leliana.

Adaar shakes her head. “I made my case plain.” Not entirely, but it’s a beginning. “Sense, Ambassador. I cannot move the Inquisition with support from only one of you.” She turns from the table and goes to the door. The conversation is over, she is defeated, but it doesn’t feel anything like it.

Josephine opens her mouth, closes it. There’s nothing to say. Adaar pauses at the door, turns her head over her shoulder, and says, “But—like everything, it’s only a matter of time.”

And then she goes.

The moment the door closes, Leliana rounds on Josephine. “Look into the Charter.”

“For what purpose?” she asks.

“Find out how we adjust the balance of power.” Her mouth tightens into a thin line. “There must be a way.”

“Do you really think she’s running scared?” Cullen asks, his brow furrowed. “Did you think that was a retreat?” He shares a sideways glance with Josephine—not once in that entire span was Adaar a woman pulling on their coattails to make a hasty exit. Even in the bleakest moment of her story, there was no fear. Only determination.

“I do not care.” Leliana looks to the map. “I no longer trust her judgement.”

Josephine sighs. “What chance have you given her?”

“It’s not a matter of chance.” Her answer is clipped. “Of all the opportunities to lead us forward—this is the path she chooses?” She gestures to the wide map, dotted with pawns from all three branches of their expertise. “A civil war in Orlais, the splintering of the mages and the templars, demons tearing us apart, and she chooses the wind.”

“She doesn’t,” Josephine argues. “She’s choosing a way through.”

But Leliana’s already sweeping out the door. “Defend her all you like. I know a retreat, no matter well hidden.”

Josephine opens her mouth, but Leliana catches her eyes at the threshold. They glint, hard as steel, and she repeats, “The charter, Josephine.”

They stare at each other. Leliana’s eyes narrow—she knows she’s made a mistake, trying to order Josephine to her bidding, and worse, in front of Cullen. Instead of answering, Josephine reaches for one of her pieces and makes no show of hesitation when she places it at Haven’s center.

~~~

That night, Leliana retires to their attic room. Josephine, reading an extremely long letter from the current ambassador from Antiva to Orlais, remains focused on the page. Armor and linens all over the room. Each thump of her boots tossed to the floor twinges Josephine’s heart. The comfort of familiarity.

But she wills herself not be fooled by it. Leliana does not return to their corner of Haven for comfort. She returns for the last blow.

When Leliana slides into bed beside her, Josephine extinguishes the candles, puts away the letter. They lay there, looking up into the dark.

“The last time we lay here,” Josephine says, “I said something unforgivable.”

“You did. Now we entertain the impossible.”

“It seems appropriate to try.” She turns on her side. Her eyes adjust to the thin light of the moon, the way she can see the elegant slant of Leliana’s nose, the mussed strands of her red hair.

“Why?” Leliana’s amusement is too curt to be real. “Because the moon is full, or because you think Adaar correct, and we stand on the edge of oblivion?”

Josephine doesn’t say anything.

“Cullen will go or stay,” Leliana says. “How is he the diplomat at the center of this?”

“That doesn’t sound like a plea for forgiveness.”

Leliana squints at the darkness above their heads. “Your pride needs a thicker skin.”

“My pride?” She can’t hide her own incredulity.

“You agree with her, and she agrees with you.” Leliana gives a hapless shrug. “What more do you want?”

Josephine says, “You want me to blindly follow your decisions?”

“You could consider my—”

“Then don’t order me around like chattel.” She doesn’t let her finish the sentence, doesn’t let her resurrect the shadows of the old argument. But her voice cracks down the center, the sheer frustration like fingers on her throat.

It cracks the shell between them. They get lost in those shadows, sometimes—the back-and-forth bickering, the prodding and the snapping. It makes its own shield, preserves them from hurting each other, or perhaps from forgiveness.

Leliana goes quiet.

“Leave it for the morning.” Josephine does not want to argue about Adaar, not now.

“Problems don’t disappear under starlight, Josie.” As though neither knows that all too well.

“Oh, Leliana,” she sighs. “It’s just you and I.”

It’s not, of course. Josephine knows where she stands, and Leliana directs her life with an unimagined amount of stubbornness. These machinations continue their forward rotation even as they lay there. Adaar grows between them—not on purpose, not like the work of a chisel and hammer, but in spite of herself. In spite of themselves. Their own differences made manifest.

Leliana exhales a long held breath, her eyes searching past the roof, past the sky. She reaches up, her pale fingers touching nothing. Josephine has watched her make the same motion while praying, the few times she’s caught her doing it. It’s an offer. An opportunity. To her Maker, perhaps, to fill her hand with song. To give her something, anything, after years of dragging herself to every dark corner of Thedas in his service.

It’s always puzzled Josephine, her religious fascination. Leliana cannot be at her best on her knees. She knows this, knows it intimately because of this gesture. Because even when she lingers there, in the deepest supplication, in her lowest moments when she most needs his voice, she still offers that hand. An expectation that the Maker will never meet. He will never bend to take that hand. And so Leliana can rise, empty fingers and all, having taken the knee for a god who is not worthy of her. Some part of her longs for the upper hand.

This is, at least, what Josephine tells herself to make sense of it. How she makes peace with a deity who will not give Leliana everything she deserves, who will deign to thank her for her strength, her sacrifice.

The wind howls past the Chantry, rattles the rafters. In the moment, the bed is a raft upon a sea of darkness, a sea growing ever wider with all the words they won’t voice. All these scars they can’t speak of, for fear of reopening wounds. All the silences. They rock this bed, this moment where they find silence—a heartbeat away from peace, from contentment in each other’s presence—and never let them forget all the things they won’t talk about.

When her hand drops back to her chest, Josephine claims it for herself and kisses her calloused palm. Thinks of the first time Leliana kissed her hand. Not at the ball, where they first met, or at the party, where they cavorted afterwards. Weeks later, in fact, after Josephine accidentally destroyed a peace accord between two noble houses while vying for a higher trade rate on Antivan grapes. A small mistake, but a priceless one. Leliana found her on the balcony after, kissed her knuckles and said nothing. It meant—it was a bad mistake, and Josephine would make worse ones, but here they were. Still standing.

Leliana says, “It will be her or me.” There’s no anger in her voice. Only a crystalline realization—as though in the darkness, a future parted open for her with a perfect clarity.

It turns all Josephine’s bones to ice. “Don’t you dare,” she snaps.

“Name the truth? Josie.” Her voice bends unbearably into a sweet condescension.

“I’m not your chisel.” She sits up in bed, running her hands over her face. “I’m not the tool you’ll use to hammer at the schism between you. I’m not.”

“You’re already there.” Leliana’s voice betrays nothing.

“Because you won’t let me stand anywhere else,” Josephine mutters between clenched teeth. “I must find you perfect, and when I don’t, you wield it against me like a weapon.”

“And you expect me not to challenge you?” Leliana’s eyes narrow.

“I never said that.” Josephine looks down at her, but Leliana doesn’t want to meet her eyes. “Not once.”

“Very well. It will still come to pass.” Her brow furrows. “I never expected this.”

Josephine cannot help but roll her eyes. “She disagrees with you, Leliana. She does not wish you harm.”

“It’s a fundamental difference.” At Josephine’s silence, Leliana says, “I would give anything for this Inquisition.”

Josephine exhales. “I know.”

“She wouldn’t.” Leliana’s voice hardens. “Yet you prefer her judgment over mine.”

“In a single matter.” Josephine has lost all control of her voice, now, all control of the space. Her heart spirals down into her stomach. “Why do you demand my blind allegiance? Business is—business. How is this different?”

A flash in Leliana’s eyes, before she can bank the flame. She thinks of Leliana’s loops around Haven, a woman who cannot sleep until every hovel and flake of snow has lingered under watch. And this massive darkness, unnamed and unknown, hurtling towards them. The specifics of the future change hourly—but this shadow, this enemy, never does.

It is different because Leliana is afraid.

Josephine touches her hand and says, “You always matter to me. Not just here, in this garret. Wherever I go, I carry you. You must know.”

Silence.

“Proof,” Leliana says—a demand, yes, but her voice lies so blank in the silence it takes Josephine a moment to catch up.

Josephine mind focuses into one scarlet pinpoint of disbelief. There is no response to give. She stands, gathers her coat from the chair, slips her feet into her slippers, and leaves Leliana there, alone in the bed.

~~

Josephine avoids her bed. The thought of sleeping alone in it after their fight seems impossible. So she falls asleep in her office for the next three nights, knowing full well Leliana only sleeps there for her, and it lies empty. Out of principle, she tells herself stubbornly as she smooths out a letter creased under her cheek.

She is tired of asking for apologies, and tired for their absence, and tired of herself for needing them now. She wishes, just once, to spirit herself up the mountain as Adaar does, and only come down when bidden. Josephine shuts herself away in her musty, dark office for hours. Letters to be written. She still pages through the thousands of words that make up the Inquisition’s ancient charter. Not because Leliana demanded it. But because—there are so many pieces still missing, and perhaps here there is some older wisdom, anything to guide them, to prepare them.

Days turn into a week, then two. And quietly, quietly, Josephine prepares to move.

She gathers supplies—Threnn, of course, proves an invaluable ally. It’s still a bit of a shock, despite the revelations of the past few days, when Josephine calls her into her office, divulges the plan, and Threnn’s only response is, “Excuse me, my lady, but—thank the Maker.”

“Oh?” Josephine hides any surprise.

“This place is a puddle,” Threnn says, “waiting to be stomped in. I’ll be glad when we’re on our way.” She bows quickly, her instructions tucked inside her coat, and leaves Josephine sitting there, stunned.

One night, two weeks from the meeting where Adaar turned their world on its head—a missive arrives.

Haven takes its meals together on the coldest nights; tonight, Josephine is perched on a barrel by the war room door, nibbling at a brown roll covered in caraway seeds and poking at what looks to be a chunk of stewed pig-ear in her soup bowl. The wind howls above the Chantry steeples. She pushes the meat to the side and attempts a piece of potato. The mealy, wet grime of it coats her tongue. The stock is going bad, she realizes, and makes a note to reinvigorate their supply lines as soon as possible, and to get someone down to the cellars.

This is who you are now, a voice inside her mourns, you chide grown women for swimming in winter and solve crises concerning root vegetables.

Leliana is not there. Leliana never is. She can feel the absence of her shadow in her very teeth, a blight needling at the very root of her. A room never seems complete without Leliana lording over a particular corner, her eyes searching out every face, every crevice, for whatever reason she needs.

Josephine looks out over the long tables where everyone is crammed shoulder-to-shoulder, packs of soldiers standing with tin bowls in their hands and red flushes on their cheeks. Cassandra and Cullen stand together, sharing a plate (and, thank the Maker, not a fork), engaged in deep conversation with Knight-Captain Rylen, who talks through a mouthful of apple. Flecks of fruit dot the space between the dark lines on his chin.

It occurs to her to find Adaar, and she spots her almost instantly—off to the side, leaning against a stone pillar and talking to Krem, and another of Bull’s Chargers. Skinner is her name. She’s showing Adaar the hilt of her knife, telling a story with utmost seriousness, until she taps one of Krem’s buckles with the tip of the blade. Krem bursts out laughing. Adaar’s cheek twitches.

Josephine finds herself wondering what look a smile paints on her face. She’s seen her hardened with determination, impenetrably focused, tight with controlled anger. An example of her immutable will. A short, harsh laugh or two. She has no idea how happiness sits on Adaar, if she’s a woman who wears it like a crown or if it washes off her like rainwater.

She suspects, honestly, it’s neither—Josephine imagines Adaar’s joy parceled out in exact measurements, gold in endless yet rationed supply—by the centimeters of a smirk, the tilt of her head, the length of an unguarded look. A warmth measured only in degrees, and by her own long, grey hands.

The desire to see it makes itself at home in Josephine’s chest. A lingering hope, an outstretched palm that never closes. And Josephine thinks: how do I shift this world to open this part of you? How do I balance the scales?

And then she catches herself staring.

It’s nothing. The last two weeks, perhaps, and too much upheaval, too much work and not enough sleep.

Haven’s inhabitants peter out into the snow—Josephine retires to her office until late, working undisturbed until a scout bursts inside, snow in her hair, panting from the run up the hill.

The note is addressed to Adaar. Josephine pulls on her coat, and gathers Cullen and Cassandra from the war room. They walk out into the cold. The night is clear with starlight.

Adaar answers the door on the first knock. Josephine silently hands her the letter, and as they stand inside her hovel, she gathers a pen-knife. The missive is from Harding.

“Should we wait for Sister Leliana?” asks Cullen, and Cassandra shakes her head.

Adaar scans the letter and then hands it back. Josephine looks to her instead of the parchment.

She asks, “Herald?”

“Therinfal Redoubt is empty,” Adaar says.

The wind screeches, high and long above the Chantry. Cullen whips his head to the door, hackles risen. Josephine tilts her head up to the ceiling, blinks. The wind cries again, an endless shriek.

Cassandra draws her sword as Adaar grabs her coat from the chair, thrusting her arms inside. She begins to run.

“Wait—“ begins Josephine.

“That’s not the wind,” Adaar calls over her shoulder.

Josephine follows their footsteps out of the cabin, turns to see a wide green mouth tearing itself open over the lake.

She’s never seen a rift before, only scrawled drawings and attempts at narrative description. It does no justice. The breach lies quiet in the sky, growing larger with each breath, but the rift rumbles with a swallowed thunder.

She remembers Leliana sneering, once—what does she do, out in the field, when the rifts present themselves? I wonder if Cassandra uses her as a shield. She’s tall enough. Perhaps she hides. I wonder.

The answer lies plainly before them: Adaar runs towards them, like everyone else.

Maker in his city—Leliana, Leliana, Leliana in endless orbit around Haven, walking the perimeter of night, how every inch of the lakeshore must fall under her eyes before she rests. The fear sinks into her chest, a cold knife. You didn’t think of her first.

The rift cracks with green lightning, unleashing a wave of long-fingered wraiths. Their screeches scar themselves into Josephine’s memory, sounds she will never forget. And then a figure walks across the ice, tall and self-assured, firing arrows one-by-one into a hooded skull.

Josephine can’t move, can’t breathe. Why does she walk the ice? The whole point of arrows is to find a high point from danger, but none of that matters now. Every inch of Josephine roots to the ground under feet.

Cassandra is there, on the other side of the rift, killing some monster with great finesse—the wind carries Cullen’s voice all the way up the hill as he readies archers, unwilling to test the ice. Mage fire streaks across the air. Josephine’s hands shake and she wonders if this is how the world ends, if Adaar is not Andraste’s Herald but her prophet, sent to warn them of all the ways they might avoid the blackest futures. Faithfully ignored by all with the power to change the course.

The wraith in front of Leliana dies under the onslaught, dissolving back into the green lightning from whence it came. Come back, Josephine prays. But there is not answer, only the memory of Leliana’s implacable face, her voice quietly saying, I would give anything for the Inquisition.

Josephine said, I know, but as she watches Leliana cross the ice, imagines her furrowed brow, her incredible concentration, her grace as she plucks the next arrow from her quiver, it becomes apparent Leliana does not believe her. Or herself. She fires a shot into a wraith’s shoulder--it screeches and rushes forward, long claws reaching for Leliana’s face. Hungry for blood. A volley of arrows flies over the wraiths nearest the shore.

(Proof, Leliana said. But was it a demand of Josephine or herself?)

What happens next surprises no one, but the sound of cracking ice splits the air from the hollow valley all the way to the mountaintops. One moment, Leliana stands steady, dueling with the demon, and on the other side of a blink, she disappears.

She’s gone. The wraith, too. The world begins to spin. It takes Josephine an entire breath to realize Leliana fell beneath the ice. She knows it because Adaar, borne with all the speed of an invisible wind, with no regard for the precarious state beneath her, follows.

Later, Josephine will wonder how the ice didn’t crack under her as well, and chalk it up to some piece of knowledge she has stored away. In the moment, all her focus narrows to the Herald, to this one thread of hope. Adaar slides the last few feet, and disappears through the gap. A practiced enough motion there’s hardly a splash.

And then Josephine is alone.

The cries of those still ashore—Cassandra’s face, haggard—go unnoticed. All of Josephine realigns to that single spot in the water, her entire body becoming a prayer. She considers herself a master of strategy, an ability to tip the scales with such far-reaching vision that on brilliant days, she knows she intimately understands the future. People are predictable—

(Proof, Leliana said. How could you not expect this?)

—their machinations easy to spot, if you know their ambition for power, or gold, or standing—

(I would do anything for the Inquisition. A ruse. What Leliana meant was, I will.)

—but now, Josephine can mark each breath that passes as it floats away, white and cold. She can count each one. She will know the exact moment her world ends. A place where all her powers mean nothing. A future darker than whatever Adaar could connive at the war table. There is nothing beyond this. Nothing left to be seen.

Green blooms under the ice. Soft as the first peal of far-off thunder in a spring storm. A low rumble from the heart of the earth.

Cassandra is there in an instant, retrieving a pointed war-hammer from the shore. It takes three blows, three merciful blows, to crack the ice. They both appear—Cassandra pulls Leliana out, her arms tangling around her, until they can both stand—Leliana, at least, leans upon until they can struggle to shore. But she is alive. Adaar drags herself out, falling to her back on the ice.

The turn is small, but at the end of it, a future exists once more.

Her hand rises, free of its bandages, and lightning streaks from her palm to the rift in an unbreakable chain. The rift fights her, but she pushes back, grips her wrist with her free hand. It takes every inch of her control.

(A portrait, Josephine will think later. Adaar, sprawled and shivering, spectacles still jammed up the bridge of her nose, her unwavering focus slowly choking the cause of their strife into submission.)

But Josephine moves now, runs down the path and the stairs, and does not see the rift knit itself back into the veil. They’ve already piled Leliana into a nearby hovel by the time she finds her way down. Adaar stands in the snow, shuddering with cold under a ratty blanket.

Their eyes catch. Adaar only nods to the hut beyond, already puffing out smoke from the chimney. Josephine touches her arm as she brushes past her. She will find a way to give her the words later, but now—

When she finds her way inside where they keep Leliana, the attendants leave them be. Josephine sits at the edge of her bed, pulls off her coat and her shoes and climbs within. She tucks her head under Leliana’s chin. Leliana grips her so tightly she knows in the morning there will be tiny bruises on her arms, her back, in the precise shape of her fingertips.

The only piece of it Josephine will regret is that they will heal—that for once, she cannot bear the marks of Leliana’s survival.

They do not speak. There’s nothing to be said.

~~~

A little time later, there’s a knock at the door, and Josephine knows precisely who it is.

“It can wait,” she whispers to Leliana, raising her head from the pillow.

Leliana shakes her head. “It should be done.”

But Josephine hesitates, and Leliana looks pointedly to the door. “If you want to play guard dog,” she mutters.

Even after all this, she can still be astonished. “You can’t be serious.”

There’s almost a smile on Leliana’s face. “Stay or go, Josie.”

It’s how Josephine ends up, with the practiced nature of a professional eavesdropper, behind the heavy door into the room. Leliana opens it, and Adaar stands there, sans threadbare blanket.

“Come in,” Leliana says, turning away. She limps a little.

“It can wait,” begins Adaar, but Leliana gives a curt shake of her head.

“If it could wait, you would have waited.” Her voice, dry as it is, does sound a little amused.

Adaar looks a little flummoxed, her eyes darting to Leliana’s ankle. “I saw it drag you down.”

“Obviously.” Leliana leans against the wall near the window, her favorite place for an interrogation. “I will be well in a day or two.”

“Good.” Relief tinges Adaar’s exhale.

A moment or two of silence passes before Leliana looks her up and down and says, “That was stupid of you.”

Adaar ducks her head. If Josephine’s not mistaken, a muscle jumps in her cheek. If she wasn’t pressed between door and wall, she’d take a step back out of surprise. “I thought you might say so.”

“If you’re the only being standing between us and ruin,” Leliana says, “you shouldn’t take risks.”

Adaar shrugs. “I’m not the only one.”

“Point me towards the other Heralds, then.” Leliana crosses her arms. “I’d like their opinions.”

“You are all important,” says Adaar, but the sentiment is wooden. Josephine can’t identify why.

“I suppose. Who else will run our operations while you pursue your ambitions around Thedas?” It’s an intriguing sight, to see Leliana be so blunt. Adaar is simply too blunt and stalwart herself to respond for anything else. The little subtleties are not so much as lost as they are useless.

But Adaar shrugs again. “Not entirely unfair.”

A silence. And then Leliana makes her move.

“Why do you want to move?” Leliana’s voice is curious despite itself.

“For our safety,” she answers. “Because it makes sense.”

Leliana waves a hand. “I think you knew that before you went to Redcliffe.”

Josephine watches Adaar’s face, watches her slow blink. It’s true. And astounding.

She nods, slowly. “Suspicions of it, yes. Redcliffe provided the proof.”

“Then you haven’t answered our question.” For a moment, Josephine thinks Leliana will point her out behind the door, but it’s only an allusion to their meeting at the war table. “Our longevity, our chances improve in case of failure, of course—but why do you only act on the truth now?”

When Adaar doesn’t answer, Leliana goes on. “Is it Cullen? Cassandra? Did their futures press you to act?” Nothing. “The mages? The peasantry? The sheep-herders of Thedas? Herald.”

The pause is brief. Adaar turns to the window, sharp. Josephine watches her long fingers clench into a fist, so hard her arm shakes. “I don’t know what happens to Josephine,” she says, in a voice that makes the room tremble with choked rage.

Leliana looks to her, her face blank. She blinks once. The answer is surprising.

“I find Cassandra, Sera, and Vivienne in the dungeons. Alive, but poisoned with red lyrium,” she recounts, her voice struggling to remain even. “Still themselves. They fall to the demons before long. And Cullen goes in battle—there’s no record of him as a prisoner.”

“You think there would be?” Leliana asks.

Adaar nods, one curt tilt of her head. “They’d gloat,” she says simply. A mercy, Josephine realizes, for Cullen to die by the sword in a last attempt. And mercy for the others, to die while still knowing themselves for who they are.

A pause. Leliana nods.

“And Josephine,” Adaar begins, “I… I nearly destroyed our chances to trying to find out—I found a prison guard’s office and lost track of time. Dorian couldn’t find me.” She looks out the window. The moonlight casts shadows on her face. Leliana regards her with a strange, examining look. Josephine’s heart thuds against her chest. “But I don’t know.”

A quiet and naked despair threads through her voice. A despair that says, I looked and looked and found nothing. A raw frustration that says, and then I decided to act.

It all falls into place, now. How strange and wounded she seemed returning to Haven. How she couldn’t look at Josephine that night, and then the sudden grip of action to move them forward.

“She could live,” Leliana offers. Unlike her to offer even shreds of hope. But her tone has softened. Perhaps she needs to speak it aloud—perhaps she needs it too.

“That thought,” Adaar says, in a tone Josephine has never heard before, “was the only light in that dark place.”

She speaks no promises, but Josephine can feel the weight. No grandeur, no dramatic, sweeping gestures. Only this simple solution to a problem so quiet only she knows it. Adaar means to save her.

The words come again and again, worth repeating. Adaar means to save her. Her.

It shouldn’t make her throat close on a hard knot, shouldn’t make her fingernails bite into her palms. It’s only a handful of words. Only this, and no more, but Josephine is nearly blinded by the quiet tenderness within them.

It is nearly enough, until Adaar sucks in a quiet breath, and says, “There are others.”

Leliana’s eyebrows nearly graze her hairline. “Then complete the tale,” she commands commands.

Adaar opens and closes her mouth; Josephine has never seen her lost for words. “You,” she says, with a useless shrug of her shoulders.

Leliana’s not fooled by such a trick, a play on sympathies. She whirls on her and says, “Don’t be stupid.”

“I only—” Adaar raises an eyebrow.

Leliana silences her with a wave of her hand. “I suppose you read in some tome that I died horribly,” she goes on. “Fed alive to a demon, perished defending a small village alone—and the guilt rips at you. I don’t care.”

“It’s not guilt.”

“Someone should teach you to heed, Herald.” Leliana makes no attempt to soften her words. “It’s a future that doesn’t exist, where none of us belong. It doesn’t matter. Now—”

“They take your face,” Adaar murmurs, and the sound of it halts everything. Even Leliana looks taken aback. They stand there, speechless.

Adaar goes to one knee, slow and graceful. Josephine will never forget the fluidity of the motion. Adaar rests her arms against her thigh, looks up at Leliana like she holds the whole world. Leliana goes still. She stares down at Adaar, and does not move.

Josephine’s heart races against her ribs. Her hand covers her mouth; it takes a dedicated effort to remember to breathe. Tender knots of heat curl within her. It’s impossible to describe how simple and perfect the picture is in front of her—how right. How she recognizes, in the thin cold air between them, that when Adaar goes to her knees, it is a promise. A promise Josephine has made to Leliana over and over again. Not the paper-thin excuse of you are better than this, but the inescapable truth: you are more.

“I find you, deep in Redcliffe. They torture you for months—months—and they are no closer to breaking you then the day they dragged you inside.” Adaar’s voice, matter-of-fact and precise in its detail, but never unkind. Josephine has never noticed this before. How she hones detail to emulate the truth in every way but never sharpens it.

“You follow me throughout. You do not leave me for a moment. You explain nothing but—you stand at my shoulder. You watch my back. When I find a guard’s office and search it, you watch the door, bow drawn.

“You die for me,” she says. “You hate me, and you die for me.”

“Of course I died for you,” Leliana snaps. “The chance for glory and honor? Of course I did it.” Her voice rasps against the stone. Adaar doesn’t say anything. “If that doesn’t satisfy, take duty instead. Take whatever you need to move on.”

“I can’t.” The refusal isn’t anything close to weakness.

“You can’t think I care for you.”

Adaar only shrugs. “Certainly not.”

“You don’t have my loyalty,” Leliana says. “Or my approval.”

“I don’t want it,” she mutters.

“Then what do you want?” She can’t hide the sheer frustration running through her voice, ragged and tired. Josephine hears the words she isn’t saying, clear notes ringing from the past: what do you expect? What conditions do you demand? How can we fail each other?

The pause is long, so long Josephine begins to ache, her thoughts winding in on themselves in an ever-tighter spiral. There is no right answer—there can’t be, and that’s why Leliana asks the question. No one will walk out of the room unscathed, and nothing will ever be mended between them. Adaar doesn’t know how the past has demanded Leliana unravel and weave herself into whatever shape needed to suit the demands of her mistresses, and now one can’t reconcile the pieces of her that war and claw against each other, which is why you must lo---

“Live through this,” says Adaar.

The quiet stretches.

Leliana says, “Get up off the ground.”

Adaar only tilts her head.

“It’s not your place.”

Adaar says, “It’s precisely where I should be.”

“You shouldn’t kneel to anyone.” Leliana paces away.

“Why?” she asks.

“Because you don’t belong on the ground.” Leliana loses her patience. “Take control. Impose your will. If you want me to follow you, lead. If you want us to survive, lead. Do something, for the Maker’s sake, other than wallow.”

“Live through this,” Adaar says again.

“Stop saying that,” Leliana snaps. “You want me to be useful. You want me to serve. You want—”

“—You, as you are.” She shakes her head. “I bear you no complaint.”

“So I am finally worthy of you,” Leliana sneers—a last defense, Josephine recognizes, “in a future which will never come to pass. I am finally fit to be listened to, to be used.”

Josephine takes a breath, and waits.

“No.” Adaar tilts her head so she can find Leliana’s eyes again. “You decide.”

A silence.

“I don’t believe in worth,” Adaar says. “Not like that. The scale never balances. I don’t want to be at the mercy of someone’s demands. I don’t want anyone craving mine. I believe in—space.” Leliana stares at her. Adaar swallows and doesn’t break her gaze. “Not yokes. There’s enough ground in this torn-up world for everyone to find a place to be heard, to be seen. For you, for me. There’s enough.”

Josephine realizes the promise of that pose, now—recognizes the echo reverberating through her veins. All those who held Leliana’s strings in the past failed her, failed her miserably because their own failings rested on Leliana’s shoulders, in her mistakes. But they are beyond that now. They are beyond being bound to each other, inexorably, without mercy or change.

Adaar’s sincerity lines her every muscle. All she wants—live through this—spoken into existence. Here is the reason, here is the root: a world in which Leliana lives, a world worthy of Leliana’s life. She sits behind the door, legs no longer able to hold her up, sliding down the wall. Adaar has no attention of picking and choosing, of taking one at the dearth of the other. As Leliana would like, she imagines.

No. Adaar means to save them both.

A thousand times better, Josephine thinks, then being saved for herself alone.

Leliana stares at her. The moment is long. Adaar waits, patient. She expects nothing—she will take whatever Leliana offers and bear her no ill will. She will not insist on loyalty, will not make promises that they align for the greater good. No. Only this.

Leliana huffs an exasperated breath and offers her hand. Plainly outstretched, waiting to be filled, a pointed expectation.

Josephine closes her eyes against the sting. It will be her own kind of faith: to hear the sound of Adaar’s long, grey fingers sliding into Leliana’s gloved ones, the slow rise from her knees till they stand on equal ground, examining each others’ faces. She can’t know what they’ll find there; perhaps, a piece of themselves, reflected in each other. Even if it’s just a shadow, a memory of them grappling together under the ice a few hours ago, Josephine hopes—prays, if she must be honest, that it will be just enough.