It seemed Dorian had taken over Josephine's nannying duties.

"Have you looked at geography yet?" he asked, pushing a richly buttered pastry into Mihra's hands. She raised an eyebrow at him from where she sat at the library desk, all but buried under mounds of parchment and leather-bound books.

"Leliana is looking for a more mundane pattern—" Mihra began, moving to set the steaming pastry down as she grabbed for another book. A wave of nausea hit her at the sudden movement, forcing her eyes shut for a moment. The vir'abelasan was certainly taking its toll.

"Eat," said Dorian, grabbing Mihra's hands and pushing them back towards her chest. Mihra shot him an irritable look but the Tevinter only blinked innocently at her until she reluctantly took a bite. Conflict settled, Dorian lowered himself into the chair opposite Mihra.

"I mean ancient geography. Is there something elvish that would mark the places where the clans disappeared?"

Mihra shook her head. "Nothing that I have seen or heard of."

Dorian made a noise in the back of his throat, folding his arms. He cast his gaze around the room, thinking. Mihra took the opportunity to set the now half-eaten pastry back on the desk and continue flipping through Magicks of the Olde Magisters. It was one of the books Dorian had requisitioned in the early days of the Inquisition, and was a largely banned title in southern Thedas. As such, every other page was still in the original Tevene, and what translations to the common tongue were present remained full of telling grammatical errors.

"Humor me," Dorian continued after a long moment, scratching the corner of his eye as he continued to stare over Mihra's shoulder. Mihra looked up at him, her finger hovering over a particularly obtuse phrasing. "How far out from the sites of these disappearances do you have to go before there is something that links them?"

Mihra frowned. "What kind of something?"

Dorian raised his eyebrows and blinked. "Anything, really. I'm thinking of all of the elven ruins we've stumbled across. They've all got something in them that could be dangerous. Maybe we've got a sort of ancient elven time bomb going off?" Dorian finished rather lamely, but shrugged and continued. "Something like that, anyway."

Mihra ran a hand through her hair. "That will be difficult to phrase," she said slowly, leaning over a map of Thedas on the desk with the Ralafern and Therahel territories delineated neatly. She sighed, and closed her eyes, forming the question in her mind carefully.

Mihra exhaled slowly, letting the spirits of the vir'abelasan leak into the front of her mind. She held her breath, willing herself to focus on the influx of answers soon to pour into her head in answer to the question. How far do you need to go? Mihra struggled to keep her own thoughts separate, as they would only confuse the responses she would be given.

A long silence stretched on. Suddenly, responses came flooding in; hundreds of spirits were clamoring for their voice to be heard. Mihra struggled to maintain focus long enough to interpret their answers. There was a word—one word—that kept pulsing through her head, but Mihra felt it slip past her every time she tried to grasp it.

BANG.

Mihra jumped violently at the sound of the library door swinging open forcefully. Focus lost, the voices of the vir'abelasan swarmed through her mind with an angry, unintelligible sort of buzzing. Dimly, she felt her nails digging into the palm of her hand as she fought to put up her barriers once more.

Dorian was standing when Mihra blearily opened her eyes. She rubbed her knee, stinging from where she had slammed it against the corner of the desk, as she turned toward the library door.

It was Leliana, her jaw set and a roll of parchment crumpled roughly in her hands.

"War room," she said darkly, meeting Mihra's eyes. "Now."

Mihra and Dorian glanced at each other, apprehensive, as the spymaster spun on her heels and stalked toward Josephine's office. After a beat, Mihra jumped up and hurried after the Orlesian with Dorian following wordlessly on her heels.

Each step Mihra took across the great hall seemed to add weight to the pit of her stomach. The near constant nausea of the past four days quickly gave way to a sort of buzzing numbness. Mihra could count on one hand the number of times she had seen that expression on her spymaster's face.

Her legs leaden, Mihra had to pause at the door to the war room.

"Fenedhis," Mihra swore, her eyes stinging angrily as she stared at the worn oak door. Dorian's hand went to her shoulder immediately. He moved to pull Mihra around toward him, but Mihra gave a low growl and shook him off as she threw herself against the door.

Better to get this over with, then. Mihra knew it had been a mistake to wait.

Her advisors were already assembled around the war table when Mihra stalked in. She felt rather than saw Dorian slip in behind her. Leliana's calculating gaze swung up towards him for a moment, then toward Mihra.

"What's happened?" demanded Mihra, her eyes boring into Leliana's because she couldn't stomach another glance at Cullen's pale, haggard expression or the red tinges around Josephine's eyes. She could trust Leliana for cool intellect in moments like these. "Another disappearance?"

"Of a sort," replied Leliana grimly. "I've just received word from Amaranthine. Their alienage has been gutted."

Mihra blinked. Once. Twice. "What?"

Leliana shook her head, glaring down at the crumpled parchment in her hand. "Overnight, it would seem. The city woke this morning to find every elf within their walls gone."

Mihra exhaled slowly, her fingers coming to rest on the war table. "That's every major group of elves on the Ferelden coast missing," she growled.

"That's not all," Leliana said darkly. "This time we were left with more than a trail."

Mihra froze.

Cullen cleared his throat in the manner of one trying to choose his words carefully. "We are still getting in reports. Nothing is clear yet—"

"There were bodies, Inquisitor."

Mihra felt a rush of blood through her ears, the spirits of the vir'abelasan rearing up to meet her pounding pulse. Joints locked in place, Mihra willed the Well to calm itself as she fought to wrap her head around Leliana's words. She couldn't imagine a Dalish clan putting up less of a fight than an alienage. Still—

"Sorry," came Dorian's grave voice from over Mihra's shoulder. "But can you be sure these attacks are related? The timing seems all wrong."

Leliana shot him another long, withering look, but to Dorian's credit he did not back down. "Normally, yes, but—" she began impatiently, shifting her weight as her gaze met Mihra's again. "My agents are reporting that Dalish weaponry had been found scattered in the deserted alienage."

Leliana's eyes were boring into Mihra's, whose throat had suddenly gone very dry. "That's—" she began, but her voice caught. "No. No. The Dalish trade; their weapons find their way into alienages all the time—"

"Inquisitor—" began Leliana severely.

"I've told you already!" Mihra was shouting now. "Those clans aren't bandits; they aren't raiders. They are historians, and they certainly wouldn't—"

An insistent tapping on the window interrupted her. Leliana narrowed her eyes as one of her crows attempting to pry the window open, a small message tube bound to its left foot. She crossed the room in a quick series of long strides to wrench open the window.

"Since the beginning," began Cullen slowly, rubbing his chin. "We've suspected magic involved—"

Josephine's eyes snapped to him. "Could it be blood magic?"

Dorian made a noise in his throat. "The amount of power required to control even a handful of people, let alone an entire clan—"

"—Would not be unheard of from what we've seen the Venatori do in the past," Cullen finished calmly. "I don't need to remind any of you what one magister did to the Wardens." Dorian scoffed.

"That's hardly an equal comparison. I seem to recall more than a few mitigating circumstances which lead to Adamant."

Cullen looked to Mihra. "It just seems more believable than two once-peaceful clans disappear and go militant."

Mihra felt a powerful rush of gratitude toward her commander as Leliana turned back to them. She continued to stare intently as a small piece of scorched vellum in her hands.

"Inquisitor," she said after a moment, setting the paper on the war table and sliding it to Mihra. "You'll want to see this. It was found in the Amaranthine alienage."

It was a map, or a part of one. Yellowed with age, the square of vellum was no bigger than Mihra's hand, its edges burned and blackened from the heat of an unknown fire. Most of the labels had been burned off, but Mihra thought she recognized the shape of the northern coastline of the Waking Sea. The Free Marches. Mihra's eyes drew towards a small, faded dot just off-center on the scrap of paper. A hole burned through the vellum had destroyed the dot's label, but Mihra thought she could just make out a faint 'K' before the letters were illegible.

"Kirkwall?" she asked aloud, looking up at Leliana who nodded stiffly.

"Yes, but there's this symbol here," she said, pointing to another spot on the map, closer to the edge. "Recently added, it would seem, and marking the Planasene Forest."

Mihra's breath caught, her heart plummeting as she bent to peer at the half-burned symbol with its achingly familiar curves, drawn by a practiced hand. She felt the blood draining out of her face.

"Do you know it?" asked Cullen sharply. Mihra looked away from the scrap of map, but couldn't meet his eyes.

"It's ours," Mihra said quietly, her voice hoarse. Blinking, she forced herself to swallow. "That's a Dalish character. A raven."

"So either the missing clans were there—" began Josephine slowly.

"Or someone is trying very hard to implicate them," muttered Leliana. She turned to Mihra. "What does the raven mean?"

"Nothing," she said quickly, racking her brain. "If you want to get into the specifics, it was archaically tied to one of our pantheon, but it's modern usage?" Mihra shook her head. "It's nothing," she reiterated. "A decoration, something to carve on your bow, or on the corner of an aravel."

"None of this makes sense!" cried Josephine, looking pale and frustrated. "If these attacks are aimed at the Inquisitor, we would have heard something by now. We have not. If this is—well—elf-baiting, prejudice, why implicate elves in an attack on another group of elves? Surely implicating them in a human attack would be far more potent to rile up a mob?"

"And what is so interesting about Kirkwall?" asked Cullen, frowning. "If that is indeed where their attentions are turning next. If they just wanted more elven blood, Denerim's alienage would be much easier to get to." He winced and shot an apologetic look to Mihra, but her eyes were back on the burned scrap of map.

Realization hit Mihra with the force of a trebuchet. "There's a clan there," she gasped.

"What?!" came the chorused cry around the room.

Mihra wiped her suddenly clammy hands on her sleeves, unable to look away from the small scrap of vellum on the table. "I don't know where they are exactly this time of year," she said quickly. "But the Blight pushed one of the old Ferelden clans—Sabrae—into the Free Marches. Last I heard they were in a semi-permanent camp in the mountains east of Kirkwall, but if they've become nomadic again—"

"We have our connection," finished Cullen. Out of the corner of her eye, Mihra saw Leliana frown deeply, murmuring to herself.

"No, no—" she muttered, eyes narrowed.

"Leliana?" asked Josephine tentatively. The Orlesian looked up, her eyes unusually bright as she met Mihra's gaze.

"Upper Bannorn," she recited grimly. "Coastlands, Amaranthine. Now Kirkwall? They are moving north—"

Mihra's stomach gave a powerful lurch as she swung her eyes down to the large map spread across the war table.

"—and taking out every elven settlement in their way."

Mihra's eyes had fixed on Wycome, her vision swimming. "These aren't attacks," she said harshly. "Its genocide."

"Inquisitor, please," said Cullen quickly in a low voice. "The fact that we found—" he hesitated. "—bodies in Amaranthine means whoever is behind this isn't afraid of making a scene. And from what I'm hearing, there aren't enough corpses for every elf in Amaranthine. Many are simply missing."

"That we found bodies today means they must be taking hostages," Leliana agreed. A frantic sort of snort bubbled out of Mihra's throat. "We found nothing when the Dalish disappeared, which means—"

"It means that the clans are either imprisoned or brainwashed and—barring that—they're dead," said Mihra hoarsely. She tore her eyes away from Wycome, adrenaline beginning its steady course through her limbs.

"You've have five days. We know this is big, and we know where they are headed next. If all of this had been a ploy to drive me out of Skyhold, then they've got my attention. But if this is bigger than me, or some rogue Venatori, or what-have-you, then I need to be in the field."

She paused, forcing herself to breathe. In. Out. Composure, to keep the vir'abelasan tame. Discipline, to contain her magic. Restraint, to stop herself from launching out of the window in a mad flight to the north. Clan Lavellan was safe, for now. It was Sabrae that required her aid.

Though you and I both now make camp among shemlen, we first are Dalish. Our priorities must forever be thus.

Another inhale, and Mihra turned to Dorian. The Tevinter nodded briskly as their eyes connected. "Well," he blustered, but Mihra knew him well enough to recognize the worried sheen of sweat growing across his face. "Good thing I didn't bother unpacking."