Nehna had been able to hold onto the throwing knives that Adan had given her through these seven years. She couldn't really wear them anymore, but they were tucked up safely in the bottom of her clothes trunk, wrapped in her old leather jacket.

If she had been any more mobile, any less sick, she would have gotten up and unwrapped them and put one right through the brothel master's head before grabbing Satheraan and Tanis and running for the docks, Dread Wolf take the Crows!

Her son, her son her child had gone to the brothel master and-

"I don't want to know," Nehna told Tanis. "I don't want to hear about it, I don't-"

Tanis left her alone, to go back to work so they could eat, and Nehna tried not to think about it but she was alone in the room and it was the dark of the night and Satheraan-

He came back to the rooms once the Summer Lily had closed for the morning, with a double handful of silver. He put it down on the bedside table- twelve or fifteen pieces. Before the brothel master had started targeting her and Tanis, that had been what Nehna had gotten in two weeks, once the price for the Crows was taken out.

Satheraan climbed into bed with her.

"Some people like children," he said, like that was supposed to make things better. "And everyone says that elves are pretty, and that's why we have clients, because they want something easy and pretty."

"This is wrong."

"You need money for the herbs and so we can stay here. And the master agreed."

It took her one shocked, horrible second to realize that he really didn't see what the problem was- this was just what the people he knew did and he'd never lived anywhere else to know that 'right' wasn't the same thing as 'allowed' and oh Creators what had she done to him. He'd fallen asleep atop her while she thought and Nehna had lived seven years as a prostitute and a full decade away from Revasina among the shem'len but this, listening to Satheraan's quiet, even breathing, this was the first time that she had honestly felt worthless.

They didn't talk about it once they'd both woken up again, that afternoon. Nehna didn't want to think about it.

But then the city bells tolled evening and her son slipped off the bed and darted out of her grasp when she tried to grab him, pull him back-

"Don't, Satheraan-"

"You need the money," he said, and that didn't matter he was far too young and her son and- "And If I do it enough I'll get used to it. That's what they tell all the new prostitutes, but I know it already."

"No, da'len-"

"I'll be back in the morning, Mamae."

"Satheraan!"

But he was out the door, headed for the stairs to the ground floor and the clients, and she was too weak to get up, to stop him, to protect him.

The days began to pass in an indistinct haze, helped along by Antivan brandy, broken only by the sound and scent of Tanis cooking food or the way that Satheraan clung to her tighter and tighter in his sleep and smiled unconvincingly when he was awake. The pain was too much, and knowing what her son was doing was too much, and the silver that was accumulating in the wood box in the kitchen was far too much. Brandy took care of all three of those problems.

At some point, Tanis brought the apothecary back. The only thing Nehna remembered of that visit was the apothecary saying something about the fact that steeping the painkilling herbs in the brandy would actually make them more potent. This was great news, but also meant that she got less of the brandy overall, since there were specific ratios of alcohol to herbs.

Tanis might have paid the apothecary to say that, actually. She was always worried about them these days, and Nehna's one comfort was that Tanis watched Satheraan through the nights, and had enlisted others to do so as well. They knew better than to try to tell her about it, but if Satheraan ever needed someone to defend him, or be there for him after something happened, someone would.

Months passed slow and fast all at once- days of being confined to bed made the hours drag, but it was always a surprise to be told how many had gone by without her really noticing.

A few weeks before Satheraan turned eight- Mythal, eight, she'd been sick over half a year- Tanis bought only enough brandy to steep the herbs in and refused to get any more.

"You haven't seen what it's doing to him," Tanis told her. "Or you have and you've ignored it, in which case don't tell me, because I thought better of you. Satheraan's so happy when he's awake and you're awake. You sleep so much, and then when you're awake you're drunk, but the few times he's caught you sober- Nehna, it would break your heart to see the difference. It's been breaking mine. Please. Stop for him, and me. We both want you back."

Nehna reached for her hand and said she was sorry. Still, the only thing that kept her sober was that it hurt so much to get up and move, and Tanis had put the brandy up high enough that she had to drag a chair over to reach it. By the time Nehna would have been able to get the chair arranged, she knew, she'd be too weak to do anything but collapse into it. That would be humiliating, so she never tried.

She watched Satheraan carefully, when she could, through re-adjusting to life without so much of the brandy, and saw after a few days that Tanis had been telling the truth. He lit up from the inside out whenever he saw her awake, and his smile was a true, happy thing, never forced. He'd clamber into bed with her and listen raptly to the Dalish stories she told, fighting to stay awake for 'one more, please'.

And she learned that he'd stopped going to the Chantry Sisters' lessons. Nehna asked Tanis to bring back some of the public broadsheets from the market, sailors' and city news, and pulled herself to the kitchen table to assess how well Satheraan remembered. His grasp of written Trade and Common Antivan was shakier than her own imperfect ability with either, but she wasn't going to worry about it. He had years yet, and even in literacy-happy Antiva, there were people older than him who were worse.

Nehna couldn't do much with him for the common script besides make him practice, the same way Adan and her old neighbors had had her practice with the free broadsheets, but she could help with an area the Chantry Sisters would never cover, not for the poor.

"You should learn the Justinian script," she told her son.

Satheraan's face scrunched up.

"But that's for the Chantry."

"And official documents, and scholarship, and literature," Nehna said. "They made common script out of dwarf signs because so many people could recognize a few already, but it also means that they can keep their secrets. Knowledge is power, Satheraan, and if you don't know Justinian they can keep it from you. What few books we have from the Dales are written in Justinian, applied to El'vhen the same way it's applied to other languages. We had our own alphabet, once, but it's yet another thing we've lost. A few times, our clan found shem'len merchants with old artifacts from the jungle where lost Arlathan lies, in the north on the coast. It is too close to Tevinter for any of The People to safely travel to, but when we took those artifacts back, there were some with writing. One or two letters looked like Justinian, but the rest were a mystery. Writing is just another thing they stole from us, da'len, and it's part of our duty to steal it back."

"How am I supposed to practice it if there's nothing for me to read?"

"I will write out the old stories for you," she told him. "That is how it is taught to the children in the clans. We may learn to speak Trade, but we learn to write in Justinian, not common. Now pay attention. The letters go in a different order in Justinian, and you write them a different way- right to left or top to bottom-"

The leftover fruits and cold meats from the Summer Lily's provided food for the clients disappeared from their table the week after Satheraan turned eight.

"The others could use them more," Tanis told her, and when Nehna asked about it. "And you should have seen the brothel master's face when I didn't take any this morning. He already owns everything else in this place- we should be able to control our own food."

The silver that had used to go to the brandy went for red meat and fruit from the market to add to the usual bread and vegetables and fish; and a month later Nehna woke up and realized she was weak and exhausted but not in pain. Her usual cup of herb-infused brandy was sitting by the bed but she ignored it and got up and went to the kitchen, forcing herself to take as much food to the table as she could before true exhaustion hit. She only let herself sit down when she was on the very edge of her energy, and started gorging. I had been so long since she'd been hungry.

Tanis wandered in sleepily to being making the evening meal half an hour later and froze in the doorway, staring. Nehna had devoured almost their entire stock of food, and what was left wasn't enough to cook with. She'd have to go shopping.

"I don't hurt!" Nehna told her. "I woke up and I didn't hurt and I was hungry!"

Tanis stood there in shock a moment longer before lunging towards the table and kissing her. Nehna laughed into it and kissed her back, and that was how Satheraan found them.

"Mamae?"

"I'm going to be all right, da'len. Everything is going to be fine."

It took another month and a half to build up her stamina properly, and Nehna hated every second of the recovery. Every night she didn't go to work, Satheraan kept going in her place. One day halfway into the month, she left the Summer Lily for the first time in over a year and bought a large wooden cutting board in the market. She put it on a shelf across the room from her bed and dug out her throwing knives. When she was too tired to walk, or couldn't come up with the energy or willpower to get out of bed, she practiced her aim.

It made her feel a lot better. She thought that she'd kept it up even once she started working again.

The day she turned up at the brothel master's office and told him to put her on the work roster and take Satheraan off for good was strange, uncomfortable pleasure. The man looked… angry that she was coming back, and so Nehna held herself straight and tall and resisted the urge to pull out one of the knives she hadn't taken off and stick him with it for whoring out her son. There was nothing truly illegal in Antiva save crossing the Crows, but there were still things that would cause a neighborhood to rise and extract their own justice.

Some of the younger men and women surprised her in the hallway and took her off to Tanis's rooms, which were full of others foregoing some hours of sleep to celebrate her renewed health. It was touching, and Nehna gave in and accepted hugs and cheek kisses and basked in the happy atmosphere and the smell of Tanis's cooking.

She was helping take the food off the stove when someone screeched. Nehna tensed and almost burned her hand.

Tanis leaned in and whispered: "Crow!"

Nehna put the pan with the cooked fish down and turned. The Crow had climbed in the window and was seated on his haunches on top of Tanis's table.

Master Escipo.

He smiled blandly at the cold rage she wasn't even trying to hide.

"So we heard right," he said. "You're well enough to go back to work. A shame you took your son off. Courtesans are better the younger they start- he could be a noble's lover one day, if only you let him. He's already learned so much, and there was a definite improvement with practice."

Nehna went hot and cold all over. The room was dead silent.

"Oh, come now," Master Escipo said. "What did you think he was going to end up doing with his life, living on the street? You should have let me take him and settled your debt, and then neither of you would be here. It's still an open offer. He's young enough to train and he's certainly got the right dedication. And seduction is a practical-"

"I told you no eight years ago!" Nehna snarled.

"And five, six years from now?" Master Escipo shrugged. "He'll just be back downstairs for the nights again. He'll be old enough not to cause a stir and he'll be pretty. He'll have plenty of people paying for him, with your skin and his father's hair. Adan was pretty, t-"

The throwing knife Nehna had strapped to the inside of her right wrist sank into his throat, and he fell forward with a wet choking noise. It was a fatal wound, and he wasn't dead yet, and Nehna grabbed his arm and twisted when he tried to slash at her, forcing him onto his stomach. She knelt on top of him, trapping the arm she'd grabbed under her leg, and pulled his head back by his hair.

"Tanis," she said. "I need a bowl."

One was silently brought, and placed on the floor below Master Escipo's head.

Nehna reached around and grabbed the hilt of her throwing knife.

"No'one 'scapes t'Crows," Master Escipo gasped, and Nehna pulled her knife out so she could slit his throat with it. It was just like draining game in the clan, so they could be neatly skinned. She'd done it often as the first step in making leather.

It didn't take long for the Crow to die.

"Andraste preserve us," someone said very quietly, when Nehna let his head drop and Tanis took the bowl to the sink to wash out.

"He killed my husband, Ashera," Nehna told her, feeling very calm and distantly pleased. "Adan was a Crow, too; and these-"

She touched her vallas'lin.

"-aren't for decoration. I know a lot about killing. This wasn't the first time."

No one else seemed to know how to react to that. Nehna cleaned her knife, stripped the dead Crow of his armor and weapons, and let those brave enough to pick through the rest of his things. She and Tanis dumped the body in the trash pile behind the Summer Lily, buried under the week's refuse, and then Nehna went back upstairs. Her knives and the Crow's armor and knives back into the bottom of her chest.

She scrubbed herself clean of blood and the stink of the trash, got into nice clothes, locked the door to Satheraan's room so no one could get in while she was gone, and went downstairs for the night's work.

The last memory she could find, when she woke up in a strange wooden room that was swaying nauseatingly, was the brothel master handing her a drink with her night's pay, 'in celebration of her health'.

"We're on a ship," she heard Tanis, and searched the room for her. The woman was huddled in a corner, and looked like she'd been crying. "The brothel master, he- Nehna he sold us. There, there's this Orlesian chevalier who's been coming around the past couple of weeks-"

Nehna remembered him. He'd been one of her clients last night, and paid quite a lot to spend most of it with her.

"-and he, he really likes me and I guess he liked you too and that, that shem'len-"

"Satheraan," Nehna realized, shooting up in bed. "Tanis, where's-"

"He kept him," Tanis told her. "He said what the chevalier paid for you and me, it was enough to get the Crows to leave him alone, and he kept Satheraan, I didn't even see him he just had the bouncer grab me when I tried to go back upstairs-"

She was a slave on a ship heading to Orlais and her son was at the mercy of the brothel. Nehna refused to cry.

No one could be vigilant all the time. If a Crow couldn't do it, some jumped-up Orlesian thug would be easy. There would be an opportunity, and she would strike, and then she would come back for Satheraan. They would leave the shem'len for good, and he could grow up in The People.

We are Dalish, and never again shall we submit.