Chapter Text
"They ran out of punch," Heloise Trevelyan says, more than a touch dry. She looks away from the gardens, over at the apostate's golden eyes.
Morrigan's gaze is at once haunting and predatory. The arch of her throat, the tilt to her head: not the dog-like mannerisms she'd expect of a Fereldan — indeed, she's birdlike. But her grace as she prowls forward is not the grace of flight, or a mountain cat.
Morrigan is hawk and spider at once, and she is not just looking at Heloise, she is seeing her.
Hel adds, because it would appear she has not deflected as well as she'd hoped, "Scandalous. I'm offended."
The corner of Morrigan's mouth quirks up. "If you cope so poorly with such a minor disappointment, I do wonder how you will handle surprise."
"Equally poorly, I expect," Hel says. She sets her empty wineglass on the balcony's railing and turns her whole body to face Morrigan. "Surprise me anyway."
"Empress Celene has given me leave to accompany the Inquisition," Morrigan says. "I will join you at Skyhold when," she waves a hand through the air, at once indicating and dismissing the ball, "all this is concluded."
"That is a surprise." Hel keeps her tone even, and though she could pick up her glass again without looking — anything to keep her hands busy — she does not. "But the Inquisition gladly accepts the aid of any who offer it. You will be welcome at Skyhold."
"But not here, I see." Morrigan draws away, and curtseys even as Hel turns to keep her in sight. "I congratulate you for your victory, Inquisitor. You have been, if not kind, at least gracious. I await the day we work together."
Hel nods at Morrigan. A splash of bright red in the darkness catches her eye, and she watches as Cullen, who had been waiting in the doorway, starts forward. He passes Morrigan on the balcony and gives her a polite nod.
He moves past Hel, instead bracing his hands on the railing as he looks out over the darkened garden. Beneath them, candles in glass baubles and round white lanterns bob and twinkle, like little motes of magic, and a slow, fickle breeze carries the clean scent of lilies, the sweetness of a dozen kinds of rose, up to them. Caught between the moon and stars above, and the pinprick light below, Cullen's skin is silvered and his hair turns almost milky.
After a moment, he turns his head to keep track of her, but he doesn't say anything. She sees his eyes drift to the emptied wineglass before he looks back down to the garden.
"Quite a night," Hel offers. "How many unwanted suitors are you up to?"
That draws a chuckle from him. "A dozen and more, I think. Leliana and Josephine have some ridiculous plan to use me as bait."
"You've refused, I assume." Heloise moves forward, leaning up against the balcony next to him and ignoring the sudden squeeze in her chest, the same pang that had struck when one of them had touched him. She has no right to such feelings. However much or little she cares for him, it's best for all if she remains unattached.
The Herald of Andraste can be no mortal woman, with loves or fears. That much, Vivienne has impressed upon her. There can be no unsavory rumor about the Inquisitor and her Commander, nor any man or woman in her company. She must be beautiful and enticing, but sexless, unless and until the Inquisition decides it is advantageous for her to marry.
"I refused," he agrees, but there's a wry quirk to the scarred side of his mouth, as if he's adding, We'll see where that gets me. He pauses, then angles his body toward her. For a moment he stares down, even as she stares back up, and then he says, "I didn't agree with your decision, when you made it, but you've carried it out well. I know the choosing was... difficult."
Hel shrugs. "Not so difficult. Corypheus wanted Empress Celene dead. I'm growing quite used to disappointing him."
"He wanted Orlais in chaos," Cullen corrects, but then his mouth twitches into that wry smile. "Either way, you've accomplished the Inquisition's goals. And now we've the largest nation in this part of Thedas on our side."
"How much does it cost you," she says, and knows she is only wondering aloud, knows for certain he will not answer, "to admit that the Inquisition needs Orlais?"
"As the Commander of your Forces? Nothing."
Which is not, she knows, the whole answer. She presses, and then waits. "And as a Fereldan?"
"It's bitter. It could be nothing else." His gaze turns once again to the empty wineglass, or perhaps to her. His eyes look pale in the lighting.
Enough, says the tension in his broad shoulders, the tight line of his jaw. Here is far enough. Or at least, that's what she'd be saying, just now, were their places reversed.
So she turns the subject to something lighter. "Think we'll escape the dancing here?"
Cullen's mouth curls again, his entire face softening into something boyish. She wonders, idly, if he has perhaps received the same speech about what can and cannot be said to have passed between the Commander and his Inquisitor. He opens his mouth to speak, but from behind them, somebody clears his throat and says, "Alas, Inquisitor, I fear not."
As one, they turn. Next to her, Cullen tenses further, recognizing some danger that she doesn't see. All Hel sees is a dark-haired, dark-skinned man holding a pair of empty champagne flutes in one hand and a bottle in the other. He wears a black mask, lacquered and fashioned to look as if crafted from bird feathers. The dark color against his golden features makes his eyes stand out, whites and irises and all.
"You're a Crow," Cullen says. He draws forward, placing himself between the Crow and Hel, as if to be her shield wall. Without shield or sword at the moment, though, unfortunately. Hel has a sudden, wild urge to curse him for being a sentimental fool; she needs no weapon to defend herself.
"I am Ezio of Antiva City, yes," the Crow agrees. "But I have not been contracted to assassinate the Inquisitor, and even if I had, I am not fool enough to try here, in the seat of the mightiest nation in Thedas, after the Inquisitor has just made herself a darling of the Empress and her Court both." He casts Hel a smile that might have been roguish if it hadn't shown just a few too many teeth.
There is hunger in his expression. The kind of flat, naked lust that has nothing to do with the meeting and meshing of bodies, and everything to do with the sound of bodies hitting the ground. He wants her dead, Hel can see, but given he turns the expression on Cullen, as well, she gets the impression the Crow wants everybody dead as a matter of principle.
"In fact, I have a message for the Inquisitor from my Guildmaster." The smile calms down, turns from cheerfully homicidal to simply cheerful. "For her ears alone, naturally. Otherwise, I assure you, I would certainly speak to the lovely Nightingale."
"Why don't you give me a brief summary, sanitized enough that the Commander of my Forces may hear?" Hel gives Ezio her sunniest, blithest smile. "Just three words."
"Knowledge," Ezio says, then looks down at the hand carrying the bottle of champagne. He gently outspreads two fingers, just barely keeping his grip on the bottle, saying, "Target," and adds a third, "Employer."
Cullen looks between Hel and Ezio. At Hel's nod, he heads, slow and reluctant, for the entrance to the ball room. He stares at Ezio as he goes, clearly an attempt to intimidate. It doesn't seem to work; Ezio only gives him a florid bow, not spilling a drop of champagne from the bottle in his right hand.
"It is truly a pleasure to meet you, Inquisitor." Ezio gives her an equally florid, foppish bow, then moves toward her. His accent is rough, and his voice is dark and smoky. He sets the champagne flutes on the railing, then half-fills them both. "A toast, to your clear victory, and then to business?"
Hel picks up the glass nearest her. "To friendship with the Empress." She tilts the glass toward Ezio, and he clinks his own against hers.
"To friends in strange places," he agrees, and drinks.
Hel waits a beat, watching him swallow, before she lifts her own flute to her lips.
It's good champagne, crisp and velvety and light as air on the tongue. She catches a faint scent of the ocean, open and wide as the cliffs by the Storm Coast, but the notes that linger under the primary taste are more like tart apple than salt.
"So what message from your Guildmaster?" Hel turns to face him. A fine tremor runs through her, but she forces herself to ignore it. Her tongue feels faintly thick in her mouth as she asks, "Who are your true target and employer?"
"Oh, no message from the Guild. The Guild does not speak to the walking dead." Ezio chuckles, then leans toward her, chucking a finger under her chin. He gently steadies the wineglass in her hand. "But one from House Trevelyan: this travesty of roles — first as Herald of Andraste, as if any living person save the Divine could speak for her, then as Inquisitor — will end, your Worship. One way or another."
He takes the glass from her faintly tingling fingers and tosses it into the garden, where it shatters on the stones below.
Hel has to brace herself against the balcony to keep herself upright. Her side begins to ache and feel strangely warm. Her blood throbs in her ears, in and out, a subtle slap like the waters of Ostwick's canals against its buildings.
And then her knees give out from under her. She has no idea where the Crow has gone — what a fool she was, to trust him, but he drank too — and though she tries, she can't seem to get the breath in or her legs under her enough to stand.
She looks up, bleary-eyed, at the sound of a familiar voice, only to find that the world is a spinning riot of motion and color. Hel has a vague impression of Dorian before she's being lifted. She feels more than sees her arm dangling, limp. The tingling in her hands has become a true and honest pins-and-needles feeling, and is quickly ramping its way up to agony. Her body feels as if it's passed beyond her control; she is as much watching it shake and salivate as she might stand on the quay in Ostwick and watch the gondoli come and go.
Cullen's voice passes over and through her. She sees a bright red streak amidst eyelet lace afterimages. She shouldn't reach for him. Enjoying his company as much as she does is a fool's errand, and trusting him is dangerous. And yet, cradled in Dorian's arms, she tries. Her hands don't obey her, but the thought is there: Cullen. Blackwall. Her two-man testudo.
Urgent voices, Leliana's and Josephine's among them.
The pins and needles move from her hands to her tongue. She cannot answer questions; she barely hears them.
When the needles reach the base of her skull, she can no longer even scream. And when they reach her eyes, she welcomes the darkness that follows. Silence and sleep are far, far better than the nightmare of her body.
She doesn't even enter the Fade, only floats in painless, soundless dark. But it can't last forever.
Hel rises slowly, the world shifting from darkness to gray, then to colorful smears, at last sharpening into clarity. The waves in her ears abate.
"I accept full responsibility. I should never have left her alone with him." That's Cullen's voice. She wonders what he's doing in her quarters.
Wait. Is this her quarters?
Sumptuously appointed — everywhere Hel lets her eyes roam, she sees velvet and satin and heavy-stitched brocade, gleaming mahogany and cherry wood, all limned with gilt or precious stones — but not Skyhold after all. Where is she? Frantic, she casts her mind back: the Winter Palace, a ball.
It all floods back in, the choices she made, the favor she won.
"What was in that champagne?" She groans. She stops, considers her words. Remembers a scarred mouth, lips the shape of a shortbow, and the slide of champagne. He'd drunk, too. She'd waited until she was sure he'd swallowed. "No. It wasn't the champagne."
"He destroyed your glass, Inquisitor." Leliana's Orlesian accent is back in full force. In Skyhold and Haven, it had been softer, with a touch of Ferelden and the Marches. Deliberate, or has surrounding herself in Orlesians just brought back an old way of speaking?
Hel feels her brow furrow as she considers. "So, the wineglass was poisoned? What was it?"
"Magebane." Cullen at last crosses into her field of vision. He settles himself into a straight-backed wooden chair, his posture perfect until he folds his arms over his chest. "No color, no odor, no taste, and in its purest form, it's thin and sticky."
Leliana adds, from her place in the shadows, "Perfect for coating the lip of a glass."
"Maker curse me for a fool." Hel draws in a deep breath and lets it out, heavy as her eyelids just now. "And here I thought I was being so clever. I thought Corypheus had hired them to kill someone else — maybe Florianne, if he wanted to keep Orlais in chaos and make sure she didn't talk."
Despite the way her accent softens the shapes of her words, Leliana's voice is steel-sharp when she says, "We will find the person or persons who ordered this attack."
Hel shifts in the bed, awkwardly reaching behind herself. Someone swoops in, helping her push the pillows into a mound so that she can lie back without lying down. She reclines, grateful and exhausted by the effort. When she turns her head, she sees Josephine looking down at her. Josie's face is drawn with worry.
"It must be Corypheus," Josephine says, "and yet this method seems most unlike him." She doesn't look entirely right to Hel without her ever-present writing board, with its candle and lens.
Hel lets out another exhausted sigh. "It wasn't Corypheus, and there's no need to go digging, Leliana." She pauses, trying to figure how to admit this. There doesn't seem to be a delicate way to say it — or if there is, she's too tired and bitter to see it — so at last, she says, "It was a warning shot from House Trevelyan."
"But you're a —" Cullen says, at the same time Leliana asks, "Are you certain?"
Josie's gaze turns sympathetic, but rather than weigh the room down with pity, she says only, "You did say you weren't on good terms with your family."
Hel shakes her head. "I'm on excellent terms with my mother, actually, and in Ostwick, that's what matters. Father may hold the title, but Mother has the blood." At the blank stares, Hel says, "Mother was born a Trevelyan. Father became a Bann through politics, but Mother is in the Book of the Worthy Families."
"Then I don't see how 'House Trevelyan' could have…?" Cullen frowns thoughtfully at her.
"My eldest sister," Heloise says, and closes her eyes, imagining Solange. How her skin was always the color of afternoon sunlight, shading into evening, just like Mother's. The cold blue eyes, the riot of shiny black curls and her delicate cheeks and nose. "Solange. Mother went to certain lengths, when I was with the Circle, and Solange never approved."
"The Crows don't come cheaply." Leliana's gaze is searching. "Hiring them to deliver a warning shot —"
"Would take great personal wealth? Solange has that. All of my generation have a share in the family fortune, which is vaster than I care to think about." Heloise can't help the wry, bitter smile that twists across her mouth. "I doubt it hurts that Solange has the full support of my father and probably her husband."
Cullen shifts in his chair and says, with the same voice he uses when predicting her chess strategies, "This won't be the end of it. No matter the history between the two of you, she'd have to be mad to hire the Crows just to deliver a rebuke. And any assassin who isn't an idiot would know that magebane isn't fatal in itself — he wanted you wounded, not dead."
"This was simply a challenge," Leliana agrees.