Leliana
Standing before the sea was one thing, but it felt another thing entirely to be aboard a ship, cradled by the water. It instilled a peace in my soul that had been missing for quite some time. A peace that I had been reminded of when I spoke of Salem to Cassandra. I stood on the prow of the ship, looking towards our destination, remembering another voyage across the Waking Sea to Val Royeaux, a voyage also spent in the company of Cassandra.
I wonder what might have happened if Beatrix had not summoned me. I wonder what might have happened if the time I spent with the Seekers in Val Royeaux had instead been spent with Salem. I wonder where I might stand now if her tainted blood had not caused her death.
Once, even whispering Salem's name in my thoughts caused my heart to race and my cheeks to flush, and my gut to twist with grief. Now, however, time had dimmed the pain of those wounds. I spoke truly to Cassandra. I had set Salem aside in my heart, in a place specific to her, where also dwelt honesty, loyalty, peace, and forgiveness. Those were her best traits, traits that she had magnified in me. I loved her and I kept that love cherished and safe. But it no longer ruled my heart. It no longer made me ache in the dark of night when I woke from a dream both sweet and sorrowful. I had survived losing part of my heart.
"I know that look." I turned towards the sound of the voice that lilted with its own cadence, that belonged to no country, but to all of them. "I have seen it upon my own countenance more than once."
I sighed and decided to listen and to speak with her. She had asked for my forgiveness, something that the woman I knew before would never have done. It shocked me to my core when she did not choke on the words she spoke.
"Tell me, what is it that you recognize?" I asked.
"Loss." Cassandra intoned. "Not the loss of something simple, but the loss of something that had a place in your heart, a planted banner, a land in your soul that belonged solely to them. There is a place in your heart that is missing, once fertile soil, now a barren wasteland. The look that scars your features comes in the moments where we stand on the edge of that desert and remember the lush and verdant land that once was."
"Well said." I replied, pleased by the frankness and honesty stamped on Cassandra's severe, stark, and beautiful features. "Do you ever walk through the desert, Cassandra? In hopes, perhaps, to find some remnant that still lives, some beauty that might still exist…that might remain?"
"Every moment that I live." Cassandra acknowledged. "In that desert lies my brother, Antony. I watched him cut down before my very eyes. The speed of my sword, the ferocity of my dedication…those are parts of me that persist in honor of him. They are things that he taught to me, when he could have flung away his little sister after our parents died and our uncle took us in." An expression of delicate wistfulness, longing, and, yes, loss, crossed Cassandra's features. "But he did not. He doted on me, taught me all that he had learned, and I watched him slay dragons and return victorious. I wanted to be like him in every way, for I idolized and loved him."
The Right Hand paused in her tale and I noticed the way in which she held her self. Straight, tall, baring her broad shoulders, her legs apart in a battle-ready stance. But her arms were crossed, not low, beneath her breasts, which would indicate irritation, but over her ample bosom, hands tucked beneath her armpits, protecting her heart.
"I thought he was invincible." her voice dropped and pain filled her cinnamon eyes. "But no. He was as mortal and as human and as fallible as the rest of us. As fallible as I am."
The great Cassandra Pentaghast, admitting her fallibility? I thought, staring at the woman, knowing that she could see the incredulity stamped on my features.
"There is something you wish to say to me." I spoke the words before I knew in full what I said, speaking with an instinct that I had learned to trust. "And it has nothing to do with loss or the fact that you are attempting to build a bridge between us."
Cassandra breathed deep and a disgusted noise chuffed out of her as she exhaled. "You are a singularly infuriating creature, Leliana Cousland."
I smiled at her. "That will never cease to be the truth." I allowed. "But it makes me no less correct. You have something to tell me, something to confide, and I would hear it, Cassandra. Believe what you may, but I desire to work alongside you without animosity as much as you do. Most Holy asked this of me as surely as she asked it of you, and I owe Justinia…I owe her the life that I now lead."
Cassandra nodded and came to stand beside me, looking out towards the horizon. Her hands reached out and grasped the railing and I saw the myriad, fine scars that decorated her dusky flesh. They were a warrior's hands through and through, and I wondered if Cassandra were capable of possessing a strength akin to Salem's. A strength so devastating and gentle that mountains would fall before a softly spoken word.
"I, too, owe her a life." Cassandra's voice lowered and took on a tone that made the woman seem…almost innocent, almost a young woman again, blinded by naïveté. "I owe her the life of an angry, abusive woman who believed in her righteousness above all else…the life of a woman who believed that a mortal being might speak for the Maker...might be completely honest."
I heard the sorrow etched in Cassandra's voice; felt the energy of her aura, and realized that the woman who spoke to me now was, in truth, not the same woman who had entered my home and taken me away from my wife. She was not the woman who had struck me and called me a heretic, not the woman who despised mages and would rather have killed them than suffer them in this world.
Cassandra had wronged me, yes, and she wronged those that I called friends. She had nearly allowed Kathyra and Rylie to die in a ship not unlike this one. She had drawn her sword against Salem and pressed the blade against my wife's throat. She had been drenched in pride and anger. She had forgotten her humanity.
"Tell me." I offered, honoring my promise to Justinia to try to work in tandem with and alongside Cassandra. "I would know more of the woman standing before me, for she is not the woman I once knew."
Cassandra turned to face me and the wind ruffled her obsidian hair. And then, for a brief moment of suspended time, light entered the cinnamon eyes and the Right Hand's lips quirked up in a flashing smile. In that moment, fleeting as it was, I saw a woman of immeasurable beauty with a potential for kindness and understanding that outstripped all others. Quick as the expression had come, it departed, and Cassandra turned her eyes once more to the sea.
"Two days after I swore my vow, Justinia came to me in my quarters. You know how unprecedented that is…for the Divine to leave the tower?" Cassandra asked and I nodded. The warrior heaved a sigh before continuing, "She told me to sit down; that she had something of the utmost importance to tell me. I thought, at the time, in that moment, that she had found another more suited to acting as her right hand. I thought she meant to strip me of my position. But what she told me was far, far worse. In fact, even the thought of it still haunts me…"
