On a bright, clear day in Kirkwall, she can see almost the entire city from her classroom window. From the crowd of ships on the Docks to the shining stained glass of the Viscount's Keep in Hightown, the sun makes the city sparkle. Bethany knows it's only the quarry stone, the salt embedded in cracks and crannies by sea wind and the mist that rises sometimes in the morning on the still waters of the harbor, but against the endless gray of the Gallows it looks almost beautiful; a kingdom from a fairytale, all winding pathways and pockets of secret things.
It's only on the hazy, dour days that she can actually hear anything though, as though the sounds of life from far away are echoing against the cover of clouds. As high up as she is in the tower where the youngest of mages are housed, the metal chime of the Chantry bell reverberates like the pulse under her skin.
Across the water she can almost feel her sister complaining, tripping over the hem a dress and crammed into ill-suiting pointy toed shoes. Aveline will marry her guardsman today – Marian writes of him in her letters, painting a portrait with words of a man she has never met. Is likely never to meet. In her mind his face is pleasant and blank, but Aveline's red hair shines like a beacon in her memory, the color of the sun before it sleeps.
Rain on a wedding day is good luck, they say.
Her classroom is stark and empty. It's stark even when it's full, nothing trusted to students still growing into their powers the way that Carver once grew into their father's shirts. There aren't even carpets on the floor, but there are scorch marks here and there. It's not any more depressing than the way the water rolls when the ocean shrugs beneath her window, or the whistle of wind past glass reinforced with iron bars.
Would that she could fly, and not fall.
But she will not allow herself envy, or regret. Life is too short to waste in bitterness, and being jealous of someone else's love, even from far away, strikes her as more selfish than she can excuse. What use does she have for those Orlesian gowns anyhow, when robes suit her so well? Blue cloth swirls around her legs as she turns in a slow circle, arms outstretched to the corners of the room.
Marian wasn't much of one for dancing, Carver either, both of her siblings with their heavy boots planted firmly on the ground. She remembers though - far distant nights when her father would offer her mother his hand and smile, lines crinkling the corners of his eyes. Her mother's laugh would ring out like a bell in the half dark of candle flame, blushing like a girl, and they would fold together, arms entwined, forehead to forehead, and sway to music that no one else could hear.
Even now, arms wrapped tight around no one but herself, it made her smile.
Somewhere over the waves, across the immeasurable distance of the harbor's tiny sea, a man in love would extend his hand and a woman would take it, white dress eddying against her feet like rushing water against stone. And they would come together, hands and hearts and gentle smiles, a force of nature, an endless flame.
Against that unbearable lightness, the absence of sunshine is a small and insignificant thing.