Hello and welcome to the third story in the Wardens of Ferelden series! This story directly follows the events of Flowers of Kirkwall, so if you haven't read that, I'd recommend it.

There are also some blanket content warnings for this fic, because it doesn't deal with a lot of happy things for most of the story. They won't be in every chapter, but they feature pretty prominently in some. Here's your list:

-torture

-discussion of torture (adult and child)

-off-screen sexual exploitation

-off-screen sexual abuse/rape (adult and child)

-slavery

-description of child abuse (mental, emotional, physical)

-discussion of suicide and suicidal thoughts

-alcohol as coping mechanism

Nehna, daughter of Sora, crafter for Clan Revasina, had had her vallas'lin for three years when she saw Adan Escipo kill a human in Antiva's thin southern woods with a swing of his hatchet, and fallen in love. The city elf was nothing like what she'd been told the flat-ears were- he was beautiful, he was graceful, he had tattoos, he was deadly. This was no trembling craven.

When she blurted this out to him, he tucked some of his loose sun-blond hair behind and ear and erupted into pleased laughter, green eyes scrunching up, light skin dappled darker in the shadows of the pine branches.

"And you are very little like the barbarian elves I have been told to expect in the wilderness," he said, and did a strange thing. He took her hand and bowed over it, like the genuflection you made to the most esteemed Hahren and Keepers, and kissed it. It shouldn't have been intimate, but she'd burned with heat all the same, and in her distraction, the only thing she could manage to do was ask what he did.

Adan's eyes had glittered with humor and secrets when he told her he was a woodcutter.

He kept coming back to see her- first under the pretense of hunting for particularly fine pieces of pinewood, but eventually dispensing of the excuse entirely. He couldn't always come, but eventually, when he did, he brought presents. A bag of tiny glass beads in colors she'd only seen in flowers. Lengths of soft leather cured in a way she wasn't familiar with. Spools of gold and silver and brightly colored thread. Bronze filigree bracelets. Knives of a metal she'd never seen or heard of before, better than steel, the hilts inlaid with leaping halla. Wooden rings he'd carved and polished himself. A silk shawl with long fringe that shimmered under its own natural iridescence as well as from the tiny fragments of mica and opal strung onto the threads. A cascade of diamonds and pearls and sapphires to wear around her neck, with matching earrings.

Dalish crafters didn't often work with precious gems, but she still knew that there was no way that Adan would have been able to afford such a thing. When she asked him about it, he smiled like he was scared she'd send him away and admitted that he'd taken it from the bedroom of someone he'd killed. People paid him quite well for that sort of thing, you see.

"So, not a woodcutter," Nehna said after a moment, and Adan relaxed.

"On the contrary," he said breezily. "A woodcutter clears out the deadwood and takes only that which will make the forest as a whole stay healthy. I do the same, only my wood is people."

Nehna didn't dare wear the necklace and earrings around her clan, but she wrapped them up in some of Adan's leather that she had left over and hid them wither other things, careful to pull them out for admiration only when no one else was around.

So, of course, she was eventually caught with them out. She'd already gotten into trouble once for continuing to see Adan and twice for the careful way she'd been carving beads of halla antler and wood for a necklace for him, and it turned out that the third time was the limit. She refused to get rid of his gifts, she refused to stop seeing him, and she refused to take back her words of love.

Her parents turned their backs on her, her friends pretended not to see or hear her, and the Keeper gave her until the evening meal to gather her things and leave.

Nehna did so with her head held high. She walked out of Revasina's camp wearing the gloves and boots and jacket she'd made from Adan's leather and decorated with his glass beads and thread. The silk shawl was tied around her hips as a belt, and the fringe swayed in time with the earrings at her every step.

It was always meant to be a temporary exile, to last only until she came around to her clan's view of things, but Nehna had her pride and knew her mind and kept walking, heading for Rialto. Adan lived in Rialto. She spent the nights on the road finishing the beads she'd been carving him, and the night waiting outside the city gates stringing them on a long length of doubled-over thread. In the morning, she tracked him down to his apartment, and still on edge by the presence of so many people and humans that she simply thrust it at him when he opened the door, saying something about Revasina kicking her out because she refused to stop seeing him.

Adan had taken the necklace, but it seemed that it had been more out of reflex than anything, because he blinked at her a few times before coming up with a real response.

"Then you'd better come in," he told her. "I have room."

That night was the first night they'd done more than kissed, and Nehna was very pleased that this was to be the new state of things.

Adjusting to life in Rialto wasn't easy. Elves could not carry weapons openly unless they were assassins like Adan- Crows. She learned how to hide the short, flat knives he gave her in her boots and under her clothes. It was unfashionable- nearly unheard of- for women to wear pants. She continued to do so anyway, but learned about skirts as well, and could appreciate the way they flared and twirled to Rialto's street musicians at the festivals. No one in Rialto knew El'vhen and the human's Trade marked her as even more foreign, so she learned Antivan. The humans and city elves had no use for most of a Dalish crafter's skills, but wood beads were cheap and city elves were poor, and little wood-carved toys for children could be any parent's weakness. She would sit in the fountain square outside of Adan's apartment building and bring shapes out wood in the sunlight, shavings dropping to the backed clay street beneath her feet.

At first the locals stared at her for her pants and the Dalish aesthetics in the embroidery and cut of her clothes and her clay-dark skin and her vallas'lin, but soon enough the local women would come with their mending or their washing or their child-minding and watch her, sit with her, talk with her. she made friends who would invite her for the warm or cold chocolate drinks out of the nearby rainforests of northern Antiva and Rivain and Tevinter, either over at their houses or out in Rialto's cafés. They couldn't pronounce El'vhen and didn't understand Dalish names, so she became 'Nina Rivasina' everywhere but in Adan's apartment.

It was through them that she learned the most about Antiva, Rialto, and humans. She learned how city elves were treated. She learned what most of the family-less elf women here had to do to survive. She learned about how much power the Crows had, how large they were- and most importantly, the way people feared them. She learned sayings and rhymes from listening to the women with the children.

One a sorrow, two a decoy
Three a lost morrow, four a man destroy
Five in shadow, six will devour
Seven and sold, eight on the threshold
Nine with the secrets
Never to be told.

Nehna learned that the only reason she was living free and healthy and unmolested was because Adan was a Crow, and even elves in the Crows got some respect. No one crossed them.

She confronted him about it the next time he came back from Antiva City and a contract, demanding to know why he wasn't helping others the way he was helping her.

"I can dispense charity," Adan told her. "But I cannot take so many under my protection. Word would get to the other Crows, and I would become a threat, and they would come for me. I am no Master of a House, I am not Grandmaster, I am in no position to insinuate myself up the ranks, and I am nothing but an elf to the humans who run the Crows. A human man with my record could be allowed privileges- control of a neighborhood, a passel of apprentices and junior Crows to manage, a wife-"

At that he stopped as he realized what he'd said, looking mortified. Nehna thought about it for moment, slapped him across the face like she'd been told Antivan women did when their men were making fools of themselves, and then grabbed him by the front of his shirt and dragged him into her face like a proper Dalish.

"Have some pride," she told him. "Do not let the shem'len own you. You kill them for a living, they are no better than you. They are worse, even."

"Nehna, carina-"

"Marry me, you fool."

The next time he came back from a contract, he brought her a gold ring set with a tiny emerald as dark as the pine trees they'd first met in. Nehna gave him a bone carving of Sylaise's hearthfire with a fine dyed leather strip twined through the whorls of flame to wear around his neck.

They never had a Chantry Sister oversee a ceremony, which was perfectly fine by Nehna and made Adan feel a little more secure. A Chantry wedding would be recorded, he said, and there was no place like Antiva for official recordkeeping. The Crows would have found out within days. Theirs was a common law marriage, which made more sense to her anyway, because what was more declaring someone family than living with them?

Her social status amongst the neighborhood changed again, because they all knew a wedding ring when they saw one. Before she'd a partial outsider, privy to everything and yet strangely apart because of her heritage and uncertain status as a Crow's favorite- but a Crow's wife was something much more. As a married woman, she was trusted to watch the neighbors' children. People came to her for advice. She was asked to assist with the neighborhood charity, since she now had a proper claim on her husband's money and possessions.

She took up fixing people's furniture and small house repairs. They were all wood or clay, and the Dalish knew those. It all turned out to be less complicated than upkeep on aravels, anyway.

Three years after leaving her clan Nehna was twenty-one, married, and pregnant. Adan was in an awful flutter the whole time because Crows of his stature did not have children, or at least none they knew of or acknowledged. Nehna was nervous about giving birth without a Keeper around, but hid it. She had things to do and people to help.

Their son was born in the winter. He had Nehna's darker skin and brown eyes, but his father's hair. She named him Satheraan and Adan smiled and chuckled a little and said that no one else would ever be able to pronounce it. Nehna held her son a little tighter and proclaimed that Antiva would learn how to pronounce it, because it was his name, and as his dangerous and charmingly-convincing father, he was going to make it happen. He could start by getting it right himself.

The winter passed well, and so did the spring. Adan took less contracts, and quicker ones, so he could stay home. He was absolutely enamored with his son, and would spend entire mornings and afternoons just lying on the floor, Satheraan flopped on his chest, talking about whatever came to mind and pretending they were having full conversations. Nehna got the neighbors she associated the most with to say 'Satheraan' correctly, and showed him off proudly in the markets and the squares, the silk shawl Adan had given her when she'd still been with her clan repurposed into her son's carrying sling.

Together, they talked about what Satheraan could be like as he grew older. Adan finally told her about his own life, about what it was like to grow up with the Crows, about the training and the constant threat of betrayal and the way that you could trust no one because no one was ever really your friend, or else they were but it always meant less than loyalty to the Crows. Nehna held him while he cried and told him that Satheraan would have a better life, a different life, would grow up to a respectable trade- a secretary, a printer, a glazier, a potter. They had money enough to buy him into a good apprenticeship, and a Crow sponsor could push him past a few of the prejudices that kept humans from taking elf children to their trades. Here in their neighborhood, they were king and queen because everyone was scared of what Adan represented; when Satheraan married, he would be king of his own neighborhood because people liked and respected him for his character.

In summer, the Crows came.

Adan had gone to Antiva City to bid on contracts, and three nights later Nehna was dragged out of bed and made to watch as they killed him slowly, because he'd dare to have what was not given. The man who was Master of House Escipo held Satheraan like he knew anything about babies and Nehna promised herself in her towering rage as Adan finally screamed that the Crows would not not not not not have her son!

Adan died with his eyes sliced open and Master Escipo soothed Satheraan when he woke up to his father's screams and started to cry himself. He rocked her son gently back to sleep as he told her that Adan had cost the Crows the entirety of the value of his training and upkeep with the need for his execution. Everything he owned was now the Crows', with the gracious exception of the clothes she was wearing and what she could take in one bag. Some of the Crows watched her as she packed up her woodcarving knives, a few changes of clothes for herself and Satheraan, and her son's blanket. They didn't let her keep any of the courting gifts Adan had given her, or any of the household money.

They didn't search her, so she didn't have to find out what they'd say about the flat throwing knives Adan had given her, and taught her how to use. She teetered right on the edge of pulling them out and taking at least Master Escipo with her when, once she was finished packing, the Crows escorted her back into his presence and he smiled and named the size of the debt that was still owed on top of Adan's death and the seizure of everything they'd owned. Perhaps the King of Antiva could have paid it back, or the richest merchant houses, she would never be able to.

"Of course," Master Escipo said, and in Adan's voice she would have called it smooth but with this man it was pure slime. "The price of a life can be paid by another's life."

He was still holding her son.

"Mine then," Nehna told him. "Let me leave my son with the neighbors and you can have me."

"Not enough," he said. "But speaking of your son- a Crow is valuable, and one brought up with us even more so. He would pay the rest of the debt in full, and then some. You could keep everything else you have."

They did not get to torment her husband his whole life just to take his son. No flat-ear, no shem'len, would break the sacred line of parent to child. She was Dalish. She knew her history, and she had her pride; and her son would have his.

She held her arms out.

"He's mine."

Master Escipo handed Satheraan back with a sharp-edged smile, and the Crows turned her out in the street.

The neighborhood wouldn't have her back. She tried taking odd jobs that she could still do while sitting and watching Satheraan, but they barely paid enough and inevitably turned her out when they learned about the Crows. The Crows were always watching, in Antiva, and it was best to stay beneath their notice. Nehna hadn't, and now they would make her pay for it.

Eventually there were no more odd jobs. She turned to begging. It didn't pay enough for consistent food, and every ten days a Crow would come and take whatever money she hadn't spent yet.

Nehna spent an entire day down at the docks trying to convince herself to ask for work for passage, but knew that no one would take a woman with a baby. Then she tried to convince herself to stow away.

She knew that the Crows would find her again, wherever she went, assuming that she was even allowed to get near a gangplank. Even if they didn't live up to their reputation, she would still be as good as dead- a young elvhen woman traveling alone with a baby was slaver bait for Tevinter.

Night fell over the sea, and when the brothel recruiter for the Summer Lily dropped a whole gold piece in her begging bowl and asked if a pretty Dalish woman like herself wouldn't object to making at least this much every night, she listened to him. She thought of the good it would do Satheraan to have steady food and someplace indoors. She thought about how even the money she'd make whoring wouldn't ever be enough to pay off the Crows, but it was the most money she would make, and how living in the semblance of false hope would be better than the lingering, soul-warping despair she had on the streets.

She accepted and felt every Dalish who'd ever live exile her from The People permanently.