Chapter Fourteen : Bare (Elissa)
The door was like any other door in Dust Town; that is to say, it was made of solid stone, with its iron hinges rusting away from a lack of attention. On most days it led to an abandoned home last rented by a man called Faren Brosca. Most days— but not today.
Only because Elissa know to look for it did she see a shimmer where none belonged, like a patch of hot air rising from the magma flows. She touched the space behind the shimmer and discovered a fold in the stone. Her finger slipped easily inside. She immediately retracted her hand, heart racing as she heard the sudden ping of a tiny blade striking stone. 'Rule one: check for traps!' she scolded herself. She protectively clutched her pointer in her opposite fist, and regarded the stone with a cautious respect.
They said that this door changed places every day, and that it was impossible for anyone outside of the gang to find. How much of that rumor held true, she did not know, but so far it had successfully kept the deshyrs' men at bay. The pay for the job was good. Very good, actually, almost too good. House Harrowmont and House Aeducan had practically begged her in turn.
Mistress Jarvia was new to her position, and she had overstepped some traditional boundary between the Diamond Quarter and Dust Town in the absence of a king. Jarvia's late husband, Beraht, had left her his business in the Commons. Allegedly, he was also the previous head of the gang. This was a problem for a man like Pyral Harrowmont, who was a traditionalist by nature. Harrowmont wanted Jarvia gone lest someone learn the Merchant Caste had been running the Carta all along.
Prince Bhelen had a slightly more intimate problem. His favorite mistress, Brosca's sister, had fucked her way into his good graces on the back of Beraht's coin. The so-called "noble hunter" had given Bhelen a son, which according to the unusual traditions of Orzammar elevated all Brosca kin to noble status.
Even after it had been explained to her, Elissa had a hard time wrapping her head around their system. It made a certain sense to elevate the mother of a royal child. But the reverse also held true! A lowborn brat could ruin a whole house, unless it was cast out, abandoned by kind and memory. It meant, as she understood it, the most valuable commodity in Orzammar was between a woman's legs. Did the prosperous families mourn the births of their daughters?
That thought made her angry, with a fury that left her shaking. When she'd heard the story of Zerlinda and seen her infant, wrapped in rags, her heart broke for them. For want of a casted father, mother and babe were thrown from their family home and into the streets. The healthy birth of a wanted child should have been the happiest day in the young woman's life. But that it was born the wrong sex— a son as castless as his father. It had become a millstone around Zerlinda's neck. That, Elissa could understand. She remembered clearly the dread of a future with no prospects, the label of a ruined woman stamped upon her skin as surely as a dwarven tattoo. It was two days past the seventh anniversary of the death of her own son. The day had passed unnoticed in her distractions with the problems of Orzammar, and only by chance had she seen the date at all. Only a handful of people knew he'd ever been. His death at birth had freed her, and that was a guilt she would bear for the rest of her life. Some part of her dreaded the moment he was completely forgotten. Lissa hated herself for missing it. She could not find the breath to speak of it. Alistair would only hurt for her, and she was so sick of hurting him.
So Lissa would hurt someone else.
The Carta was evidently a necessary beast. The implication behind her orders was clear enough— cut down the head and a more amenable leader would rise in Jarvia's place. But Jarvia was not an idiot. At the first whiff of danger, she had gone to ground (such as it were), digging her fingers into the gangs like a spreading of tree roots which cracks cobblestone.
As she unlatched one of her hip pouches, Elissa briefly wondered what knowledge a mage would gather from the enchantment on the door. Dwarves did not have magic, but at the same time they possessed it. She had seen more marks inscribed with lyrium in a few short days in the city than she had in her entire life. Runes for clean running water, for smokeless cooking ovens, for light, for decoration, for holding back the darkspawn at the gates… How had the dwarves lived before lyrium? Orzammar was built on magical bones, carved into the heart of a quiet volcano.
"How good is your information?" Zevran asked her in his native tongue, facing outward on the alley as he kept a lookout.
Elissa felt a little pang at the sudden realization that her Antivan was growing rusty. She brushed away the grief of Oriana's absence and croaked back: "Come again?"
"How good is your information?" Zevran repeated, verbatim, tapping his fingernails against the sandy mortar in the masonry. He looked like he was waiting for her to catch on, grinning as he was.
"I suppose you think you are clever."
"Your words, not mine. I count no less than five pairs of ears listening."
"Seven," she retorted.
Zevran smothered a chuckle into the back of his wrist. "On the roof?"
"One of mine, for the day. He generously lightened my purse. He is waiting to see if we survive."
"And…" he scanned quickly. "On the roof opposite?"
"That is a servant of the crier. Also waiting to see if we survive."
"How cheerful."
"The mage's contact told me what he could." She avoided naming the man, as the prying ears would parse that much. Godwin of the Circle Tower, last seen quivering in a cupboard, had been eager to direct her to Rogek, a lyrium smuggler of the undercity known to deal with outsiders. Elissa needed templars. More particularly she needed to woo the templars out of Jainen City. Bann Alfstanna— anxious about mages— was hoarding them like a high dragon hoards gold.
"Is he not one of her lieutenants?"
"He is more… how you might say, an independent party. The Carta is a sea serpent with many heads. This one is bad for business."
Zevran nodded appreciatively. It was a motivation he could understand. Assassination was not strictly in the purview of the Grey Wardens, but today they were not strictly Wardens. "Princessa Salazar taught you well."
"How could you tell?"
He winked. "Your accent would never pass in the slums of Antiva City."
"Damn. Am I highborn in every tongue?"
"Impeccably. You remind me of my friend, Rinnala. She enjoyed being the sharpest person in the room, and kept her nose in the air, but she never minded getting her hands dirty."
"Is it meant to be a compliment, Zevran, when you compare me to an old lover?"
His eyes flicked downward and he answered in Common. "You tell me."
The finger bone totem barely had to touch the slot in the door before it opened for them. Lissa took it back and appraised the darkness beyond. "What can you see?" she asked, knowing his vision in low light was much better than hers.
"I see a long tunnel which curves off to the left. Does that match what the man told you?"
She nodded, and stepped across the threshold into the dark. The strange door closed behind them, as though it had a mind of its own. She got the sense that it was impatient. Or maybe that was the nervous thrill in her stomach. The anticipation of a good fight made her blood sing. She blinked hard, willing her eyes to acclimate to the dark.
"So, my dear Warden, we have a plan?"
"Light as a shadow, quick as breath, more than a rogue I became."
"Mm. Rinna loved that book."
"Thomas Howe gave me a copy. You might borrow it." Not just any copy. Her copy. Not that that was anyone's business. She had torn out the dedication the moment it fell back in her hands. Crumpled it, smoothed it, re-read it, and finally commanded herself to burn it.
To my Lady, on the eve of her seventeenth nameday:
A most instructional gift, I believe.
Yours always,
Nate
Yours always. A relic of a past to which she could no longer lay claim.
"Thank you." Zevran sounded slightly strange, small and turned inward, although it might have been the echo of the tunnel. "Was it a gift? Or a warning?"
"Both, I should think, if he is his father's son."
"If there is time," he decided, "I should like to see it."
"Do you read?"
"One of the whores in Rialto taught me out of a novel. I learned sums in the brothel ledger." He laughed. "Does that satisfy your morbid curiosity? Warden, I was only seven years of age when the Crows bought my life to balance my parents' debts. I was an investment. They paid for a classical education to equal any bard."
"Sorry."
"It is to be expected. Your family trained you to be an arlessa. A certain amount of snobbish naivete comes with the territory."
"Sten says I'm callous. Is he right?"
"He is not wrong. Not that I would ever say so to your face. I want to keep my tongue!"
Elissa unhooked two grenades from her belt and pressed them into his outstretched hands, leaving four for herself. They were glass bulbs, filled with swirling purple liquid which turned to gas when exposed to the air. They could be thrown and smashed, or unstoppered and rolled, depending on how quiet you needed to be. Quiet was always better.
"Confusion grenades," Zevran recognized, and fastened the pair to his belt. "In the open air these dissipate in moments. But this is a confined place. We will be exposed."
"Then I suppose it will be the perfect time for you to carry out your master plan. Morrigan would delight in finally being right about you."
"She will never stop checking my cooking for poison." He squeezed her shoulder. "It is beginning to sting."
As her eyes adapted to the darkness, Elissa saw a flicker of light at the bend in the wall. This proved to be cast by pair of braziers. Their basins were filled with dying coals, glowing a feeble red and filling the narrow space with black smoke. She pulled her scarf up over her mouth and nose; likewise, the elf clasped a handkerchief in his off hand. 'Don't cough,' she told herself. Deeper into the tunnel, her eyes and throat began to burn, even after she dampened the cloth with her water flask.
The rock face in the shaft was warm to the touch. This part was natural, a gap between smooth igneous rock, emphasizing that the previous part had been carved out by tools. Was that warmth residual heat from the braziers, or did it mean there was magma on the other side of the shaft? It would be useful to have some of that… what did the dwarves call it? Stone sense.
At the end of the passage was a low door, marked with the sign of the black sun. The paint was fresh, no more than a few months old. There was a sigil on the handle. She was sure that she had seen the marking before, on the shops in the Commons. Strange clues when taken separately, but together they confirmed a story Lissa already knew.
What was that sound? That thrumming noise in her ears, like a melody she just could not remember? She scratched her earlobe. Was it her own heartbeat?
Zevran stood close beside her. She could not see him but she could feel his hand on her wrist. His breath came quick on her cheek when he tapped four times on her pulsepoint. Four people in the room. Maybe she was not going mad after all. The crack at the edge of the door was blindingly bright. She unscrewed the metal cap on a grenade and palmed it, slipping her thumb over the threaded mouth to prevent it from leaking. Bottled insanity.
Lissa crouched down low and pressed the corner of the door experimentally, searching for trap threads as she glided her fingernails along. The well-balanced door pushed in easily. She created a gap of about four inches. As the voices became more distinct, she rolled the confusion grenade as hard as she could across the tiled stone floor. It was not a large room, but the glass bulb was not a perfect sphere, and it rolled in a skittering parabola toward the left corner.
She let the door fall closed, and braced herself against the floor as she drew a dagger from the sheaths fixed to her back. For a long, breathless moment, there was quiet. And then:
"What's that?"
"Who goes there?"
The sounds of clanking as armored bodies rose from chairs and lifted their weapons off the table, breathing in the purple smoke. And then came a frenzied sort of roar as the Carta within turned on each other in blind rage, no longer able to discern friend from foe. The fight behind the door raged fierce and brief. Zevran counted, tapping her wrist, as three bodies dropped. They waited, listening, to the gargled panting of the survivor. The Crow drew the shape of a question between the leather straps of her bracer, lingering on the tendons and blue veins under her translucent skin.
"Kill him," she answered with barest breath. The hairs on her arms stood on end.
The five remaining confusion grenades were spent when the alarm went up. Five dwarves in plate and leather, ten dwarves, what was that to a Grey Warden? But Elissa Cousland thought of none of these things as she and Zevran slew the inhabitants of Beraht's estate. She only heard the sweet pulse in her mind, almost a song. Kill. Rend. And Jarvia herself, hardly anything, just a woman of flesh, not nearly what the stories made her out to be.
But Zevran—
"So why would the Crows send you, Zevran?"
"You are speaking to me now?"
"Shut up."
"You can be very contrarian, Alistair. Is there some reason why they should not?"
"Plenty of reasons. Starting with the fact that you weren't exactly the best they had, were you? Lissie beat you with only one good arm."
"Slander and lies. For shame, Alistair."
"I'm not an idiot. Well, not most of the time. You're no raw recruit, but I've seen you fight. You're no master of combat, by any means."
"Assuming that I intended a fair fight, that would indeed be a problem."
"But the Crows must have master assassins, the way you describe them. Men with years and years of experience. Why not send them?"
"Why not, indeed? It is a mystery for the ages."
"If you aren't telling me, there must be a reason."
"If you must know, the masters do not often take contracts outside Antiva. And I made the best bid."
"Best bid?"
"We agree to pay the guild a portion of whatever the contract offers. The one who agrees to pay the most gets the contract, so long as the guild deems them worthy."
"And they thought you were worthy?"
"Against a pair of Grey Warden recruits? Apparently so."
"Were there many who wanted the contract?"
"None. You are still Grey Wardens, after all, and even in Antiva, killing members of your order is considered... impolitic. It made the guild's decision considerably easier, I imagine."
"Well that's comforting, somehow. But they didn't tell you?"
"Who you were? No. An unfortunate surprise, I assure you. I do not believe Arl Howe told them, or else the price would have been much higher."
"So you're a discount assassin. Howe bought you on the cheap."
"A bargain!"
"You are bleeding," Zevran whispered, reverting to Antivan.
Lissa looked down. Her gambeson was saturated with red liquid. "I don't think so." She felt sluggish. The crime lord was in pieces under the toes of her drakeskin boots. There was a pinky finger floating in a pool of blood, colorless, shockingly naked. Like an earthworm drowning in a soggy garden.
It was no longer raining, but wetness persisted on Elissa's cheeks. The tears came almost independent of her emotion, like she was wearing someone else's face. Silent, gulping, wracking sobs bubbled up between her firmly clenched teeth. She had to stop crying. She was so sick of crying.
She blotted at her nose with the end of her shawl, again, and grimaced at the feeling of the wet wool against raw skin. Her head was pounding. The parchment on the table was irreparably ruined, already curling where the blooms of ink feathered into black roses. Was it raindrops or teardrops which stained the page? The table in the garden was wet. The whole stack of paper was ruined. Why had she insisted in writing outside?
Oh yes, the wailing.
My Nathaniel, she had written, before violently blotting out the "my".
I pray the winter you find in Starkhaven is a mild one and that Ser Varley is a kind master, although I may never understand why you have been sent to squire at your age. I heard it said that Thomas is the new heir in Amaranthine. She scratched away "Is that my fault?" and left: I suppose that means you will stay in the Vael Court indefinitely.
Forgive me but I cannot find the strength to prattle through the pretenses of a proper letter. I know I have been remiss. I received your letters. All of them, I think, but they have been screening my post, so I cannot be sure. Doubtless you find my silence in these months a mark of disinterest. Regardless, you are bound to your new master.
Yesterday, I bore a son. He did not live to naming, but I planned to call a boychild Byron, after your namesake uncle. My father disagrees. The priestess came and took him away this morning. I think it will be recorded as another William Cousland, if it has a name at all.
Forgive me.
The smell of earth lingered in her blocked-up nose. The earthworms fled the sodden ground only to trap themselves on the paving stones, writhing in a slow agony.
Elissa counted her fingers. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Good. She needed them for… "That's your blood, Zev. On me."
"Potion," he prompted.
"Yes." She grabbed at her belt but found only splinters of glass. "Damn. When I fell they all broke."
"Lis, they hit you with a warhammer!"
"Did they?" Strange that nothing hurt. Zevran called her Lis, that was wrong. That was emotion boiling in her throat. "No, you moved. You moved between us."
Zevran laughed. This time it came out like a sob. "I think Alistair is going to kill me. Come, I have enough for us both, yes? Only I cannot reach."
Falling to her knees, she worked the clasp of his belt loose until the leather strap fell free. "Sorry," she exhaled. He groaned as she shifted him to reach his potions. "Is it your finger?"
She lifted the potion to his mouth. He swallowed, and after a minute the flush of life rushed back into his brown cheeks. "It was Jarvia's," Zevran explained. His voice was hoarse. "You disarmed her— quite literally, might I say. Good work."
Elissa thought she must have sucked in a lung of confusion. She remembered almost nothing; the room was a stranger to her. Another comfortable merchant caste front room, with cushioned chairs and a table dressed with silver. And blood splattered on the ceiling lamps.
"More might be coming," Zevran suggested. But even as he spoke this, he was stripping out of his armor.
"No. My watchman on the door would let us know."
Bare, the elf's torso was a mass of bruises, turning rapidly from blue to green as the healing potion knit his ribs back together. They would never be quite the same. Potions only accelerated the natural process, which meant scars, lumps, and pain when the weather changed. It was hardly spirit healing, but it would keep you alive.
There were other scars littered upon his lithe, muscled frame. One particularly large and toothy one she matched to his tale of jumping through a glass window. On his chest were precise marks from a knife. On his flank were old burns. And on his back...
"Like what you see?"
"Those are lash marks," she observed, almost quizzically.
Zevran smiled. It was not a kind expression, but it was amused. "Yes."
"Someone tortured you?"
"A welcoming gift from the Grandmaster of House Arainai. The Crows test their candidates to see if they can hold a secret, should they be captured by a rival House. Most break upon the rack, literally or figuratively."
"And?"
"And I was stubborn." He stood up.
"You were seven."
"I was even more stubborn then. You know this about me. I do not flatter myself when I say I know what it is to wish to live above all else. Or to feel the keen desire to die."
Jarvia's corpse stared up from the floor with a look of open-mouthed surprise. Her body looked like it had been ravaged by a beast— limbs sliced away from their torso and organs eviscerated, spilling onto the tiled floor. Lissa bent down and quieted that expression, closing the eyes with her fingers and pushing the mouth shut. 'I did this,' she thought, repulsed. 'How did I do this?'
"Are you accusing me of something?"
"Quite the contrary."
She sensed Zevran wanted to say something. "Was it that friend you mentioned? When did she die?"
The assassin sighed. "Two years ago, or close to it. I took the first contract out of Antiva City."
Elissa frowned. "When Howe sent you after us."
"My original contract was for two Grey Wardens." Zevran began to buckle his armor back in place. "A commander and his junior. But my ship ran afoul of poor weather on the open sea, and by the time I was in sight of Highever, the city was already in flames."
"You're lying! You can't have been sent to kill Duncan and me in Highever, because I was never meant to be a Grey Warden. Duncan came to recruit Gilly— Oh. Of course. You were meant to kill Alistair. Duncan and Alistair, I mean. Before Rendon sacked Castle Cousland."
"Presumably to prevent the famous Warden Duncan from saving your parents."
"—he still failed—" she interjected absently.
"Lord Howe revised my contract when we met in person in Denerim, but in such a way that it could continue under the original terms, without approval from a Master. It was rather clever. I was still to find one Warden-Commander and one junior officer. The last in Ferelden."
"But Alistair never came to Highever. He was on some sort of errand for the Chantry."
"Leliana asked him about that. The task was for Grand Cleric Elemena, who personally asked for him by name. He could hardly refuse."
"Shit. Why tell me this now?" She ran a gloved hand through her sticky curls.
"I wanted to give you the chance to be properly and truly alone if you needed to order the death of a Grand Cleric." Zevran clasped her hand forcefully between his own. "If you say the word, I would do this for you. Your irreproachable prince need never know, Lissa. I am as religious as any Antivan, but we both know he has ties to the Chantry which run deep."
When he used her name it made her chest feel strange. "Why would you even want that, Zev?"
"A queen who plans on keeping her throne needs an assassin or two on the payroll. I might stay close by."
"And what would that mean?"
"You did not trust him enough to bring him today."
"He's too good for this kind of thing."
"Alistair's vaunted morals preclude him from killing gangsters." Zevran lifted her hand and stripped her glove away, finger by finger. When her hand was bare and trembling, he raised it to his mouth. It was a unearthly sight, like something plucked from a dream. It was the wrong mouth, but her skin did not seem to mind. Her cheeks burned; her stomach was cold. "You ask me to watch him because you do not trust him, and then you try to pretend that I cannot see what is happening."
"Zev, don't do this." Her feet were frozen to the ground.
"Just ask Alistair why he visited the Shaperate. Or ask him what he and Morrigan are planning."
"Zev, please." Her voice broke. "I can't do this with you."
"I see. I would never stand between you."
Zevran had this look in his eyes, like he wanted to kiss her, just to see if she would let him. Elissa did not know whether she wanted him to try or not. But that was grief talking. Gently, she pulled away from him. "No one is stupid enough to kill a Grand Cleric."