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Harding insisted on a bedroll.
“You—” she said, jabbing an index finger, when Iseult pointed out that their room in the cottage had more than enough space for a bed. “—were sleeping on a couch the entire time we were in the Lighthouse. Don't act like you know anything about comfort."
"Lace," said the elf, "your definition of 'comfort' is a tent, a thick blanket, and the forest floor. If you could, you'd sleep through a thunderstorm with only a large leaf for cover.”
It wasn’t that she was trying to be petty. Mourn Watchers and Inquisition forest scouts didn’t often end up in the same place together, much less decide to share the same residence for the foreseeable future. There was always bound to be some friction. The Lighthouse had room and enough for everyone in their little band of wannabe god-murderers, and household squabbles were rare. Unless it was over Emmrich’s spare skeletons. Or Neve’s coffee. Or who was next on dish duty. In response to their leeriness, Emmrich sat them all down for a three-hour lecture on skeletal anatomy, and how that was conducive to his experiments on the Fade. If her mind wandered far enough, Iseult could still recall the rattling sound of Taash’s snore one hour and thirty-three minutes into Emmrich’s speech— probably somewhere between the supraorbital foramen and the mental foramen.
There were bigger things on their minds, then. Now? Anything was fair game. It was just another one of those things.
“I don’t get why everyone seems to have a problem with that,” Harding huffed. “Did you know what Emmrich brought with him on our camping trip? Shaving cream. And Manfred. And then he’d shrieked when the bears caught a whiff of his shaving cream and decided to show up to dinner. Can you believe the nerve? He better not think I’ve forgiven or forgotten.”
“Is that why you didn’t talk to each other for two weeks?”
“No, that was because he thought my exploding arrowheads were flint and tried to light a fire with them! You can probably guess what happened next. Those cost a lot!”
Iseult couldn’t help her chuckle. Harding glared. “This is serious business! Half of my savings went to those arrows!”
“Sorry,” she managed, around the giggling, “but why did you bring exploding arrows to a camping trip with Emmrich?”
Harding was grumbling. “For the bears. You haven’t been to the South. They’re nasty little bastards.”
The chuckling in Iseult’s chest died down. Slightly. “I’m sorry. I believe you.” But she was still smiling.
“You’d better.” Then, the dwarf narrowed her eyes. “Wait— don’t try to distract me from our argument!”
“Oh? We were having an argument?” Okay, look. The world wasn’t ending anymore, Harding didn’t have poisonous skin, and they were able to finally take a breather, together. If anyone asked Iseult, teasing her beloved relentlessly was just part and parcel of that.
Harding grasped at the air, exasperated. “Yes! We were! Maker, you’re such a—”
And who could blame her? Iseult loved how expressive Harding was, how deeply each emotion passed through every small face she made. Exasperated Harding was probably her favourite, though. Truly a sight to behold.
She tried to keep her expression still. It didn’t work. The laughing came back in full force. “Does this mean that this is our first couple’s spat?”
“Sully, we’ve squabbled before.”
“Yeah, but—” She felt oddly sober. “Not like this. Not standing in our empty bedroom, in our cottage, arguing over what kind of bed we should sleep on.”
Ours. Everywhere else they’d stayed belonged to someone else— Dock Town, Arlathan, Rivain, the Lighthouse— even when they were small-time, trying to track down Solas and avoid him at the same time, they slept on rooftops and back alleys and in the second floors of taverns. They’d tramped all over Thedas. They had their safe houses and basements and attics, but nowhere was theirs. Not truly.
Harding’s brows unknitted themselves. A wistful sort of look overtook her— another one of Iseult’s favourite expressions— and settled into something small, private. “I guess you’re right. I guess this really is our first argument together, huh?”
“Can you imagine? We'll be fighting like an old married couple soon.”
Harding's laugh came straight from her chest. “Shush!”
Their cottage had one floor and four rooms, a blank canvas for them to close the book on a story spanning decades and spill ink onto fresh pages. In time, they would be sitting at the dining table bickering about what species of wood to use for new wall panels. In time, they would go out the back, talk about setting up a garden, and plant cabbages and carrots and potatoes and flowers. Iseult’s books and papers and parchment would occupy every shelf they had, and Harding’s climbing ivy would grow to span all four walls on the box they called their home, outside and inside.
They compromised on a futon. That was their first page.
“Scoot over. We wouldn’t need to keep getting blankets if you didn’t hog them all the time—”
“I do not hog the blankets.”
“Yes, you do, don’t look at me like that, every night I wake up and you’re curled all around them like some kind of sausage roll. Seriously!”
“That’s only because I’m cold!”
“Sully, it’s dead in the middle of summer.”
In the kitchen several of the pots and pans Harding nicked from the Lighthouse hung above the sink. Stolen from Lucanis, Harding said, after Iseult asked her where they came from. Stealing from an Antivan Crow was not something anyone did. Iseult preferred to believe that Lucanis simply let her keep them, hoping that their dwarven scout's predilection for unconventional recipes would fade with access to better utensils and proper cooking space.
It did not, and what a dream that would have been. Ah, the best-laid plans. Lucanis’ pots and pans only enabled Harding’s ability to come up with even more culinary travesties. Scouting in the Fereldan forests for weeks at a time left much to be desired when it came to gastronomy, and the habit didn’t go away even when they relocated to the Lighthouse and an actual kitchen instead of a deep pot over a fire. They’d all had their fair share of ham and jam slams. Iseult was sure Lucanis would have popped a vein if creamy apple noodles appeared on the dinner menu again.
But there was something so Harding in her taste for the sweet and savoury, something simple and honest and endearing. So what if grapes didn’t pair with beef Wellington. Lucanis wasn’t here, and his poor kitchenware couldn’t cry bloody murder either. This was their home, and they could do whatever damn thing they wanted.
“What exactly are we making?” Iseult ran a jug of water over a basket of strawberries, let them soak for a moment or two. Sunken light streamed from the window, slightly ajar, illuminated every phosphorescent dust particle hanging in mid-air.
It was spring, and in the morning they’d gone to shop for produce they didn’t grow themselves. Harding gaped at Iseult for a full minute back in the Lighthouse when she told her she’d never perused a proper Fereldan market, and that was that. Spring trip to the farmer’s market, non-negotiable. The dwarf flitted between tarpaulined stalls with the self-assuredness of a weathered marketgoer who knew what she was looking for, greeted every seller generously like they were the dearest of friends. Which, in a way, they were. Thedas was their oyster when they lived in the Lighthouse, but the sun always shone a little brighter when you came home, the grass always a little greener.
Harding was grating up mountain cheese on the counter next to her. “Berry and cheese bake. I usually make it with plums, but the strawberries looked too good to resist,” she said cheerily, and hummed a tune as soft milky-white strands fell into the bowl. “Slice them up when they’re done rinsing.”
Iseult got the knife, turned the handle over in her palm. Once, twice. Wait. “Lace, don’t tell me you took this from Lucanis too.” She saw Harding’s face tilt slightly away from her, trying to hide a grin. Didn’t work. Iseult saw through her right away.
“Mm. Something like that.” Harding was giggling. “Did you know he draws on the walls?”
“Lace… dying by the First Talon’s hands isn’t the way I want to go out.”
The mound of cheese in the bowl grew larger. Harding’s grin could only be described as shit-eating. “Oh, I haven’t told Neve yet. She’ll be the first to know if he ever comes knocking.”
“When he comes,” said Iseult with an indulgent shake of her head, “I’m deaf, and had no clue what you were talking about.”
Staccato chop-chop-chop of knife against a damp maple cutting board punctuated the back and forth, provided rhythm to this song and dance of theirs. What an oddly domestic scene this was, Nevarran Mourn Watcher-turned-god-killer and Inquisition scout-turned-god-killer standing side by side cutting up ingredients for a recipe that could only be described as a crime against all known forms of culinary delight. Outside, the breeze picked up slightly, blew the leaves around enough to be heard through the kitchen noise.
“That’s too bad. Then you wouldn’t know that he likes to doodle angry little crows carrying little daggers. And you wouldn’t know that he sometimes draws kittens, too.” Harding leaned over to whisper in a conspiratorial hush, as if what she’d said so far hadn’t been damning enough. “Kittens and flowers, Sully. Our very own First Talon.”
“No.”
“Yes. They were adorable.”
“First you take his beloved kitchen knives, and now you tell all and sundry his deepest secrets? My, Lace Harding. I had no idea you had such a black heart.”
Harding tipped the cheese into a pan, smoothed the heap out so it lay even, smile still wry. “You’d still love me anyway. Maybe the years have just changed me.”
Chop-chop. “Hero of Thedas, defeated by idle hands.” Chop-chop. “Whatever will we do with you in your old age?”
“Oh, hush.” Harding pushed the pan over. “You can spread the strawberries over the cheese. We’ll add potatoes next.”
Love was every strawberry in the basket, Iseult thought. Love was sunlight glinting off window hinges and doorknobs. Love was every unripe carrot in the garden, the squirrels stuffing themselves with the sunflower seeds in the birdfeeder by the porch. Love wrapped its warm blanket around them, clung to them like dandelion fluff, the simple inhale-exhale of a home.
The next thing was the bees.
Harding attended a bee club meeting after several new honey stalls cropped up at the farmer’s market and came back with a frenzied spark in her eye. Iseult had just begun setting the dinner table, and over mutton and turnip stew they argued the logistics of having an apiary in their backyard. It’ll be a new hobby and something to do, Harding charged on, and besides, I’ve always wanted to try my hand at keeping bees!
That was that. The long summer days were taken to clearing out shrubs and nettles from overgrown patches for the pond, the early autumn evenings spent hammering together pine boards and cutting wire for boxy beehives. Gatherings of asters and goldenrod dotted the space behind their cottage— a complete ecosystem right in their backyard.
The flowers were planted in late autumn. In early spring, as the rain came, they bloomed, and the beehive came alive.
It was nice, Iseult found, to set your mind on a goal and be satisfied with the outcome. For too long their sole goal had been something for which failure was an unthinkable outcome, allowed no room for slips or second-guessing. But here, it was fine if the nails were hammered in crooked or if they bedded out flowers a bit too late. It just meant a little more fixing, and a mental note not to repeat the same mistake again. The world didn’t end if they pulled potatoes too early. The blight never came when they forgot to water the garden beds for a few days.
So it was fine when Harding gestured to the dirt-stained hive with a smouldering stick and said “I think we have a mite problem.” The sun did not turn red and Thedas still stood.
Well. Nothing a bit of fire couldn’t handle. It was like that, with a few bumps in the road. Once, a few weeks or months ago, Iseult couldn’t quite remember, an inane fight about wallpaper colour spiralled upon fresh-old hurts. Red reminded Harding of Her. No, not purple, too much like the Lighthouse, or light grey, too much like the Fade. But the sun shone and dawn came and the plants needed tending to. The elven gods had escaped the Veil once. No argument could ever hold a candle to that.
Soon enough honey season arrived and they were up to their knees with it.
“Ma says she can’t take any more. Sully, has Neve—”
“Lace, if I send Neve any more honey she will reply with an icicle through the Fade and into my skull.”
“Are you sure? Can’t we just—”
“She’s been using them as office favours for her clients. The Neve Gallus. The private eye extraordinaire. Baking honey cake for her clients every weekend. Can you imagine? We’ve already broken her. I really don’t want to push our luck.”
A grimace, then a sigh. They sat on both sides of kitchen table, nursing mugs of camomile tea and honey. Iseult was already starting to gag at the taste of honey.
Harding groaned into her hands like it sucked out the last remnants of her soul. “What about Emmrich?”
“Manfred’s been enjoying it, but Myrna says they’ve enough for mixing embalming fluids. Emmrich says, and I quote, ‘I thank you most sincerely for these wonderful and unexpected gifts, but if you send any more, it will start to come out of my ears.’”
“I don’t suppose we can try to pawn some off on Bellara or Taash?”
“Sorry,” and Iseult looked genuinely forlorn, “nothing on both fronts.”
It wasn’t until Neve was sick of Iseult’s wheedling that she gave them another idea: please just sell it all. If I have to see one more jar of honey I will die on the spot and you’ll be paying the funeral bill.
And they did, hauled wooden poles and tarp and a bench to the next farmer’s market. What they had made was barely anything compared to what they saved from their god-killing days. It wasn’t money that mattered.
Iseult got them a corkboard, of sorts. They hung it on the living room wall because the wall was the first surface anyone saw when they entered the cottage, and its bare state was not something Iseult could suffer for long.
Life added up, eutrophic and accumulating. A eutrophic home was the sign of a space well lived in.
The weathered wall panels belched dust at them when they sheared back cracking wallpaper; large flakes fell to the floor easily enough with a bit of peeling, until the only obstinate slices left were the ones that had to be scraped away.. Harding held the ladder as Iseult went over the wood again with an eighth layer of polish, citing lack of height and reach as reasons why she wasn’t adequate for the job. Besides, the gloves fit you better!
The only corkboard in the Lighthouse was Neve’s insane detective conspiracy board. You’re a walking stereotype, Iseult had said, when she saw the multicoloured string and pins and marker-tipped question marks, the whole nine yards. Neve held a single hand up and sighed like it wasn’t the first time someone had tried to make her aware. Don’t. My clients still need to think I have some semblance of dignity.
There never was a second corkboard in the Lighthouse because they’d never needed one, with the knowledge that the entire arrangement was a temporary thing. But still they decorated the living room and kitchen spaces, lit candles and torches to make the space friendlier, like it hadn’t once been the headquarters of the god they tried to murder. They pushed new chairs and couches through eluvians, left notes and greetings on doors and walls. The scattered nutrients of their lives, collecting in the pond that was their shared home.
The first few things to fill the board were lists. More practical things, in the beginning. Grocery lists. The watering schedule for their garden. Inspection calendar for the beehives. Little things that needed fixing to make the space more livable. Hieroglyphs of their lives, scribbled in Harding’s loopy script, Iseult’s cramped hand, done up with toothpicks snapped in half when they couldn’t be arsed to find pins, or tape if they were feeling cheeky enough.
Then, small things. Snippets from the newspaper. A particularly large leaf from forest walks. Harding’s charcoal sketch of their cottage, framed with leaves from the surrounding maples. Iseult pinned up small trinkets from Arlathan, botanical drawings of lavender from Nevarra. A small poem and a good morning note from Harding. Morbid quotes from Iseult’s books. Their oligotrophic corkboard eutrophicated under their noses, needed only attention and a beating, pulsing life.
Unconstrained, the board naturally spread from its four corners. They got rid of the rickety chairs that came with the cottage and replaced them with pillows and rugs and a loveseat. Iseult lit candles and enchanted them to float about the living room, left dog-eared books on the armchair until she forgot and made a big show of hunting around for them again. Harding hung a planter next to the windowsill and seeded it with bluebells, potted climbing ivy, cleared space around to let it grow.
When night came and the winter snow fell they curled up on the loveseat, a comically large throw blanket over their legs, the candles illuminating pulsing halos in the dark like large fireflies.
“How many pillows did we get? A veritable dozen?”
“Baker’s dozen,” mumbled Harding, against Iseult’s shoulder, fighting to keep her eyes open. They’d spent the entire day weeding. She was already beginning to fall asleep.
The elf shifted to press a lingering kiss to Harding's forehead and allowed her own eyes to sink close. Whoever had said the couch wasn't a proper or comfortable place to sleep was a damn liar.
Harding’s planter cast a long shadow into the kitchen, swaying from the hovering candlelight. Pen and ink and an unfinished letter to Neve Gallus and Rana Savas, Investigators on the writing table. Another one next to it, To Ma. A jewelled skull on the too-tiny shoe rack.
The corkboard, not Neve’s insane detective conspiracy board, but something worse: a life, an algae bloom right on the canvas.
“Gosh, I don’t think I’ve ever seen fresh snowfall this thick in these parts of Ferelden.”
“Maybe it’s a sign.”
“A sign— what are you— Sully! You can’t use magic! That’s cheating!”
“What’s that thing the Orlesians like to say? ‘All’s fair in love and war?’”
“Get back here!”
Iseult returned the gargoyle grotesque to the Grand Necropolis, in the end. It wasn’t that they didn’t have space— the cottage had four rooms but they were spacious enough— it was that she couldn’t bear the disapproving scowl in Harding’s eyes every time she had to lay her sight on the thing.
So, she slunk back to Nevarra with a giant stone statue, as normal people did. It fit through the eluvian this time.
The Necropolis had always been like the sand in an hourglass— flowing, in motion, static, above change. Idly, Iseult wondered how many more floors were added to the magical floor counter on the first level since she’d left the first time. Watchers were constantly stumbling into some secret passage or another. You could be heading to your first mummification of the day, get lost, and end up in a completely unexplored section of the crypts. They’d found unburied remains of angry primal dragons that way, after all.
Myrna and Vorgoth were there when she arrived on the first level. They’d been there since she first fell into the Necropolis, had been there for her every initiation and milestone. If Emmrich was the Necropolis in the Lighthouse, Myrna and Vorgoth were the beating heart and spirit of the crypts, of all ten thousand and counting levels.
“Ah, Watcher Ingellvar. Come to return to your studies?”
“Sorry, Myrna. Not today. Just returning this.”
There would come a time when Iseult was ready to make a homecoming, when the itch in her bones beckoned back to where it all began. But not today. Today, the word home took on a new meaning.
In the shrouded foyer of the Grand Necropolis, away from the archway flanked by towering stone statues of Nevarran royalty from an age past, Myrna raised a perfectly manicured eyebrow. “I had wondered where that grotesque went when we last tomb-swept.”
Iseult tried not to look sheepish. “It’s here now. From… Markus the IX’s tomb relief?”
“Karlus. Back straight. Watchers don’t slouch. We serve the departed with—”
“—Dignity. I got it, Myrna. It hasn’t been that long.”
Myrna regarded her sharply. “Any amount of time away from the Necropolis is time enough.”
“WATCHER.” Vorgoth drifted over.
Iseult felt a distant quailing, looking upon the two people— beings— who were, essentially, her parents in every other sense of the word. It was not her mother but Vorgoth who’d instructed her on the enunciations and cadences of speech befitting a Nevarran Mourn Watcher, Vorgoth who drifted along, steadied her with gloved palms when she tripped and cut her elbows in the Necropolis’ winding hallways. It was not her father but Myrna who’d dressed her in the Watchers’ quilted tailcoats, Myrna who took her to the Memorial Gardens for the first time and performed the traditional rites so that it would be seared into a young elf’s memory. It was not her parents but Vorgoth and Myrna who’d given a lost infant a name— Isolde— after some forgotten Queen or another, and taught her the language of the dead hidden in death masks and burning incense.
“Hey, Vorgoth.” A hand-wave. Really. Was that all she could do? “How’ve things been down here?”
“THE NECROPOLIS ENDURES. IT IS NOT EASILY SWAYED.”
Even if the world exploded tomorrow, someone would still have to pick up the pieces and put them in their resting places. It was just how they were, unchanging, in a fired glass bubble, while the rest of Thedas went on above them. For Iseult, the thought became a refuge, before the dead started to have delusions of grandeur, before a certain bald head and pointed ears decided to tear open the fabric of reality.
She clicked her tongue. “I don’t think anyone could have anticipated two ancient gods trying to blight everything.”
“You forget your Nevarran history,” Myrna said, tutting, hands on hips. Even in her dreams, Iseult couldn’t escape that disapproving gaze. “The Grand Necropolis has remained where it stands well before Andraste’s time.”
“MYRNA MEANS TO ASK IF YOU HAVE BEEN WELL, YOUNG INGELLVAR.” Vorgoth said, in that raspy timbre that reminded her of flickering candles. “WE HAD HOPED THE WORLD WOULD BE KINDER TO YOU.”
Well. What a truly odd word.
“It’s been— well. You know. It’s been. Fine.” Too benign— Myrna smelled a lie from leagues away— but how could any inadequate word describe all that had transpired since the War of the Banners? Watchers hardly ever left the Necropolis. There was simply nothing in their vocabulary able to account for any of that. So. Fine it was.
Myrna wasn’t so sharp anymore. “Always the eloquent one, Iseult Ingellvar.” The eyebrow again, a different inflexion of meaning.
Damn. She’d been had. “Oh, alright,” she said. “I’m taking some time off, for a few years, maybe. Ferelden.”
Myrna clicked her tongue. “With the scout?”
“How—”
Vorgoth chuckled gently. Vaguely, a sort of half-memory floated from the back of her head— smell of magic, cool breath of wind— Iseult imagined a smirk underneath the black pall of mist. “YOUR EMOTIONS, YOU HIDE WELL. OTHER THINGS, NOT SO.”
And suddenly, she was nine again, trying her damndest not to appear too indignant as Vorgoth patted her head and explained why the books in the restricted section of the crypt libraries were restricted for good reason. Oh, how the breeze changed.
She opened her mouth. Vorgoth beat her to it.
“WE ARE PROUD OF YOU, YOUNG ONE,” they said plainly. “YOU HAVE SURPASSED OUR GREATEST EXPECTATIONS.”
The War of the Banners was a faded memory, something from aeons in the past. Iseult thought she’d forgotten the tribunal’s stone-faced recommendation, thought she had left behind the other Watchers’ whispering and side glances in the lecture halls, the Memorial Gardens, the balconies overlooking the descent into a misty nowhere. Yes, she resented the tribunal’s decision, but she had not known then that the fuel for the anger was the fear of losing her home.
There was another home now, overgrown, welcomed by Ferelden’s eternal woodlands and a certain dwarf’s cloudless grin. There was room enough in her being for one more.
From the foyer’s missive table, Myrna produced a small terracotta potted with a gathering of striking vermillion flowers. Thin stamen radiated from grouped inflorescences near the stem, where they stood to attention, directly perpendicular to the ground.
Ritual botany had been part of the Watchers’ curriculum. Iseult strained to recognise them. “Corpse flowers?”
“Lycoris,” Myrna corrected, “growing around the Pentaghast mausoleum just before you arrived. Given their propensity for sterility, they’re exceedingly rare to see growing in the wild. They will be relocated to the Memorial Gardens where we can better serve them.” She brushed a tender hand over the umbels. “But,” she continued, “perhaps you should have these.”
And she pressed the pot into Iseult’s palms, cupped the back of her hands, and looked right at her. “The Necropolis will always be a place to rest your head, Iseult. You musn’t forget that.”
The red spider lily placed the first roots of spring into their new garden, anchored life into the freshly tilled earth. Cloudreach sent a hint of rain into the air, damp and breezy with a million green buds.
Harding looked on, casual hand on hip, as the elf finished patting the bulbs into their new home. The mycorrhizae there would lend it a helping hand, allow it to sink its roots deep into the soil, but its leaves would not arrive until the air changed and the dry waft of autumn blew by. “That’s an… interesting choice for the first plants in our garden.”
It was easy to see where the name came from. Corpse flowers could not be ground into medicine or added to dishes because they were poisonous. They could not accompany a wedding bouquet or a garland for a young mother; they were far too spindly, far too sterile, far too red for that. Red like blood, red like a blighted moon.
Rebirth. That was what Lycoris radiata meant. The Watchers of Eld favoured the vivid red perennials as funeral offerings, planted bulbs around sepulchres and reliquaries when the bell of mourning rang once again, blessed the dead and the red spider lily with the gift of repose. Rebirth.
What was rebirth, but allowing a new home to embrace your heart?
“Flowers for the living,” Iseult said simply, and smiled.