"There you are."

She opened her eyes to find Lenore leaning onto the parapet next to her, looking into the distance, where the sea was shimmering in a rather rare instance of Ferelden sunlight.

"Wishing you were out there?"

Sometimes Lenore had an irritating way of speaking to people without looking at them.

"You're very sneaky, aren't you? I didn't hear you at all."

"It's a talent."

"Do you regret it? Becoming a Warden?" Isabela asked suddenly.

"Don't ask me about regrets, Isabela. One always triggers the next." She sighed, then said anyway: "I honestly don't know. If none of this had happened, no Blight, if my family hadn't been killed, I might have ended up just another lady in Denerim. Married someone suitable, had children, might have gotten involved in politics anyway. I was prepared to do all that. I might have liked it. I might not have known what I was missing, fighting for my life and everyone else's every other day, being tainted by Darkspawn blood, the nightmares. I don't know what's worse, running around the Deep Roads covered in gore, or not being able to do so, because I have to deal with Amaranthine's problems and organise the Fereldan Wardens." She turned to Isabela, gave her a small smile. "There's no point dwelling on it, though, things are as they are. I am not unhappy. You seem to regret a lot, though."

Isabela tensed. It was her turn to look away now.

"I should have run away before my mother had the chance to sell me into marriage. I was pretty, I was smart, I would have made my way. At worst, I'd have ended up a whore. Not so different from being married, really."

She could feel Lenore's eyes on her, but kept her own gaze resolutely trained on the horizon.

"Zevran talked about you, once you'd been mentioned. Told me what went down with your husband."

"You shouldn't trust a word he says." Neither should you trust me. She'd changed the story so often, she almost didn't know what the truth was, anymore. "You mentioned me to him? Why?"

"Oh, I didn't. Morrigan kept complaining about me vanishing for hours with a pirate harlot. That... peaked his interest. She had a way of complaining about my personal choices, you'd have thought she had an interest herself. Told me she'd changed her mind later on, that she'd rather I go back to my pirate whore – sorry – than watch me and Alistair make puppy eyes at one another."

"You slept with the king?" Isabela blinked at her.

"He wasn't the king back then."

"You could have been queen!"

"Yes, that idea came up a lot," Lenore sighed.

"Why did you refuse?"

Lenore tensed.

"Because I should have died, not lived, selfish as I was, to become Queen of Ferelden."

Her hands balled into fists, and for the first time, Isabela thought, the Warden had lost a little of that cool composure she otherwise only ever seemed to relinquish between the sheets.

There was a story there, and she found she wanted to know it. Wished she had Varric's way of coaxing every last secret from people. But she was not the kind of person others trusted easily. Most of the time, she considered other people's emotions little more than a nuisance. But there was one way she knew how to deal with Lenore. She took a step toward her, took on of those tightly clenched fists and pried it open gently.
"You're tense, dove. Let me help you with that." She lifted Lenore's hand to her lips, kissed the pulse point on her wrist, then moved her lips up her thumb, licked the tip, then sucked on it slowly, for good measure. Lenore looked surprised for a moment, then relaxed a little. Isabela sought her eyes and increased the pressure as she saw a slight blush creeping over Lenore's cheeks.

"Why don't we finish this conversation in your bedroom, sweet thing?"

. . .

As she was bent over her dresser gracelessly, Lenore wondered for a moment if she was making it too easy for Isabela to distract her. Then again, she had come looking for her, and hadn't sex already been on her mind as she'd spotted the pirate standing on the battlements, wind tearing at her hair and the flimsy thing she called a blouse?
But then Isabela pulled down her smallclothes and for a long time after that, Lenore didn't think at all.

"So," Isabela said softly, stretched out next to Lenore on the bed, bodies cooling from their exertions, "Why does a sweet, hot, eager little thing like you think she should be dead instead of queen?"

Lenore rolled over onto her stomach and was rewarded with a hand immediately moving to her ass. "You don't want to hear about all this. I bet you have interesting stories to tell. Funny ones. Hot ones," she replied vaguely, even though a part of her wanted to talk about this. She'd never talked about it to anyone, Alistair hadn't cared to, and she couldn't blame him.

"Let's make a deal. You tell me, and in exchange you'll get a rousing tale of love and lust between a guard captain and her subordinate."

Lenore raised her eyebrows.

"That sounds... nice?"

"Affair at the Barracks was a big seller! Varric had to change the names, or Aveline would have killed us all..." Isabela sniggered.

She frowned.

"You've lost me there."

Isabela moved swiftly, straddled Lenore's back, and ran a single finger up and down her spine, making Lenore shiver.

"I think you want to tell me, dove. Get it off your chest. Or back."

Lenore pressed her cheek against the pillow, closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Maker, she did want to tell someone.

"I haven't talked about this to a single person in ten years. It's... before we slew the archdemon. There was a ritual. It was blood magic. Otherwise one of us, Alistair or me, the Warden slaying the archdemon, would have died with it."

"So you're feeling guilty because there was blood magic involved? That's it?"

Lenore buckled then, threw a surprised Isabela off, turned to her and huffed indignantly.

"No, Isabela, that's not it. Maker, if that had been the only decision..." She sat up and drew her knees to her chest.

"Morrigan came up with it. She said if Alistair slept with her, she'd conceive, and if he killed the archdemon, its soul, the soul of an old god, would not destroy him, but instead pass on to the unborn child. And I made that decision. I told him he had to sleep with that woman he hated, else one of us would die, and I let a witch with no moral compass whatsoever bear a child with the soul of an old god, all because I was so desperately looking for a way to get out of this alive."

A hand on her shoulder, patting her awkwardly.

"It wasn't fair to force you to make that kind of choice."

"Life isn't fair, Isabela. You surely know that better than most."

Isabela snorted.

"You were what, twenty? Of course you wanted to live! You'd just been introduced to life's pleasures by a dashing pirate captain."

That made Lenore smile the slightest bit.

"Someone else would just have sent Alistair to his death. He would have done it, wouldn't he?"

Lenore turned her face away and shrugged, feeling just a little like a petulant child.

"Ugh, heroes!" Isabela grabbed her chin roughly and forced her to look at her. "What do you want to hear, Lenore? That you were a bad girl? Want me to spank you? Want to hear that the world would be a better place without you? You know that's not true. You may think that all this here, leading Wardens, dealing with politics, is your penitence, but that's not true, either. You'd do this out of some stupid, annoying sense of duty, even if you'd never been put up to that decision. You might not torture yourself like this, you might not punish yourself by keeping your distance to everyone around you, hiding behind that cold aloofness, not letting on how lonely you are, but you'd still..."

"That's enough, Isabela. It's quite enough."

She pulled back and turned her face away, heart racing, all of a sudden.

"It was wrong to bring this up. Let's not do that kind of thing again. I don't let feelings out, you don't let them in. Seems like a perfectly dysfunctional arrangement."

Isabela looked at her, frowning at that last comment. There it was, people always thought they had you figured out. Then again, she had thrown quite a lot of that at Lenore, too. She shouldn't have said all that, probably, but that damn virtuousness made her blood boil. Why was she drawn to that kind of person? What was wrong with her?

And why did she want to slap that carefully neutral expression off Lenore's face?

After all, she really didn't need her feelings. It made no sense.

"If that's what you want, sweet thing," she said, trying to mimic Lenore's lofty tone, then slid off the bed, picked up her clothes. "I feel like I've been overstaying my welcome already, anyway." Slid into her smallclothes, pulled her blouse on, fumbled with the lacings of her corset.

"Where will you be going?" Lenore asked, as Isabela picked up her daggers from the floor.

"Denerim. I need to make some coin, and there's always work in a city like that. Has to be."

"Don't get into trouble."

Isabela just rolled her eyes.

"Oh, I'm sure I will. I always do."

She turned to Lenore, who was looking at her impassively, still sitting with her head on her knees, all that damnably beautiful hair spilling around her, making Isabela want to touch it, in spite of everything.

"There's a party of Wardens leaving for Denerim tonight, you can catch a ride."

Isabela nodded slowly, after a moment, softening a little.

"Sounds like a good idea. And... thanks for picking me up."

She made to leave, but Lenore said lowly: "Wait." She'd gotten off the bed and approached Isabela quickly, came to a halt in front of her.

"Let's not part like this."

Isabela cocked an eyebrow.

"How do you want to part?"

Lenore's fingertips skimmed her cheek, and Isabela let herself be kissed altogether too gently. She wasn't sure what Lenore was trying to convey. An apology? A mere farewell?

"I rather enjoyed this last week. Thank you, too. There are always Wardens in Denerim. Send word occasionally that you're still alive, won't you?"

"Pirates don't write letters," Isabela said almost automatically.

"Troublemakers can always use friends in high places," Lenore replied with a smile. "And a bed to sleep in should they ever find themselves stranded again."

"If you put it that way... We'll see."