The Vigil was quiet, this late in the evening. The stars had come up long ago, while the glow of Amaranthine city lingered. Alistair walked the courtyard with no deliberate purpose, besides the wakeful itch behind his eyes, like a hurlock might jump up behind him at any moment and start shouting oogah-boogah.
A darkspawn would never do that. And it would never have been just one of them.
But if he was going to be up he might as well be useful while he was at it, so: a watch. A walk around to confirm the peace. Wardens weren't meant to keep still.
Something bounced across the ground in front of him, and it took him a moment to find the thing, a small disturbance on the stonework courtyard. A rosehip? What in the—
A second struck him in the back of the head, a light dink against his skull, and if he'd had his sword on him he would've raised it to strike. Instead, he looked upward, from darkened window to darkened window to that lit window. In the middle of the tower, his love hung halfway out with said window with a bowl in her hand. Serelle Cousland, he thought, is nothing if not resourceful.
Alistair grinned and beckoned her down with a gesture. She upended the bowl (dink-dink-dink-dink), withdrew into their room, and he thought for a moment he ought to find someplace to hide, to make make her properly track him down after naming herself with thrown fruit instead of a shout. The impulse only lasted a moment.
The great door groaned beneath her hands, and she raced out into the courtyard. She had the outline of the woman she might've become without all the hurt of a Blight beneath her skin. Her hair was still bath-wet and unbound, falling to the base of her spine. She hadn't put on any shoes.
"Do you miss the late nights and monsters creeping around every clearing so much you've gone looking for them?" she asked.
He didn't answer her—no, he swept her up, took one of her hands on his and rested his other on her hip, and led a few steps of a dance he only ever half-learned 'til he thought he might break from smiling. And then he accidentally led her right into the Vigil's exterior wall, with an oomph and a sorry and a lingering kiss with his fingers buried in her hair. Palms warm from her skin, backs cold from the damp.
"I've missed you," he said, after he pulled away and caught his breath, "Every time our paths might've crossed in the last three weeks."
"Three days," she corrected, and nibbled on his throat in a very distracting way.
She'd dressed in a plain shirt and breeches, and he found his hands now beneath the shirt, tracing circles right where he knew she was most ticklish. Serelle pushed off the wall, forward, into his arms. They overbalanced-she'd meant them to. They would've both hit the cobbles and probably lost a bit of skin if not for the sacks of grain that someone should've taken inside this afternoon.
"It felt like three weeks," Alistair said, shifting. He leaned back into the wheat-sacks, drew her close, and shivered with the chill damp of the night air and the feel of another thing beneath his skin than just himself. Serelle placed her hand, flat-palmed, over his heart.
"You can't sleep, either," she said.
He didn't joke, just shook his head, moving his chin back and forth against the top of hers. Serelle drew the fabric of his shirt into her fist. So she'd shared the darkspawn-dreams he'd had every night this week, terrors you couldn't wake from, nightmares only half-remembered.
Every day that passed, everyone he'd encountered looked a little more exhausted, a shade more brittle.
"I'm naming Delilah Howe my heir tomorrow morning. Then the Wardens will withdraw to Weisshaupt, and..."
"And us with them, just like that?"
Now Serelle shook her head, straightened her fingers, pushed away. She knelt there before him, in the dark and in the Vigil's shadow, and took both of his hands and held them like all her will might trickle away between their laced fingers.
"You will explain to the queen," she said, "And I will disappear in the commotion. There is a better way than this, and I will find it or die trying."