Chapter Thirty-Four: Rock the Ground

"Somebody stole my child!" an elven woman with a misshapen bun and wild eyes was saying to every passersby, hands clinging to the river gate's bars, arms reaching through the grate to reach for someone to help her. "Somebody took my child; she was right here and she did not just walk away. She can't walk…"

Around the corner, out of sight of the guards impassive to the mother's plight, Eliante closed her eyes and tried to deafen her ears and heart to the frightened woman's babbling, stealing only the quickest of glances at Katriel. Her companion seemed as emotionless as Eliante herself wished she could be, hood and hair pulled far forward to hide her own elven heritage. Katriel had endeared herself to Eliante forever by offering no reassurances, no false platitudes, as they had raced across Highever to the alienage gates. She did nothing to suggest that this plan would go off without a hitch, that there would be no complications, no death, and as a woman who had as much to lose in this gambit as Eliante herself did, her presence was nothing short of stabilizing.

Katriel had her brother to lose. Eliante had her friend Anders, who had been loyal from the start despite his snarky noncompliance, and… whatever Nathaniel was to her.

But she didn't have the luxury of deciding what exactly that was at the moment. She was busy. She was busy waiting for the sounds of explosions, starting small and then building to a crescendo that might rock the ground; Malcolm had described what it would sound like, hazel eyes burning brightly. She was waiting to hear screams; she was waiting to smell smoke.

She was waiting for Highever Castle to happen again and for the Couslands, delayed in their vengeance, to come out on top this time.

"Somebody took my child," the woman was saying more softly now, whimpering, the words directed to herself now that she realized that no one was going to help her, slumping forward against the metal gate, uncombed pitch-hued hair tumbling forward over her face. "They told me she was sick; I told them that no one could take better care of her than her mother. One day later, I left her in the yard and she was gone. The basket didn't just walk away."

Moved in spite of herself, Eliante looked to Katriel. "Can't we—"

"No," was the immediate and brutal answer, delivered with arms folded impassively and a face devoid of sympathy for her people, perhaps her kin, on the other side of the gate. "We can't. Not if we want this to work. You'll learn."

Chagrined, Eliante turned her head and looked away. It was close to midday; the city was at the peak of its bustle and business. None of the passerby nor the soldiers marching in the thoroughfare that ran parallel to the alienage wall noticed the flare that lit up the sky like a renegade star, twinkling in defiance of the sun, but its green light flickered in in reflection in Katriel's eyes. "There it is," the young elven girl said quietly.

Eliante squinted her eyes and tried to look, but it had already burned up. "Not red?" she asked after the signal that would have told them to cease and desist, that all had gone awry.

"Not red," she agreed and grabbed Eliante's hand just before the ground rumbled hard and fast beneath their feet.

It was a quake that stopped almost before it started, but all around them people were freezing in their ordinary business, soldiers were halting in their march, and all around was the whispered, murmured, frightened question: "What was that?"

Everyone had a hypothesis: "Was it an earthquake?" asked a young mother with a baby on her hip.

"The Amaranthine coast hasn't felt one in decades," answered a wizened old man from the window he sat out, wrinkled face cast in the shadow of his home, "maybe centuries."

"Maybe it's a sign of the Maker's wrath," said a short, balding merchant, nervously tugging at his chantry devotee's amulet, "of his anger at the king's death and the regime change."

"Maybe it's the darkspawn."

"Aren't they a sign of His anger anyway?"

"Have they tunneled under us?"

"Are they even this far north?"

Katriel and Eliante, knowing the truth, did not say anything, still-clasped hands concealed beneath the folds of their winter cloaks. When the latter cast a curious glance at the former, all Eliante saw was a schooled expression of shock and surprise on the younger woman's face as she stared at the ground as though expecting the cobblestones to open up their jaws and consume her. It was a convincing production, especially as they were still waiting, waiting for:

"Open the gate! Quick, you have to open the gate! The garrison is burning and half a dozen other buildings with it!"

The speaker was a runner; sweaty and disheveled, keeled over with hands braced against knees now that his mission had been accomplished. The aftershocks of his words were immediate: everyone who had ceased their business when the ground had shook was now even wider-eyed and even more frightened.

From the other direction came the sound of marching. A small battalion of Amaranthine-liveried men were pushing their way forward down the street, brushing aside stunned and shaking townspeople. At their head was a red steel-armored figure, a man of unremarkable height but possession of a jaw that suggested strength and hard eyes that coded casual cruelty. Eliante pushed her back close against the stonework of the alienage wall, recognizing Rendon Howe's trusted guard-captain, Lowan.

"What are you talking about, man?" Lowan demanded, taking three broad steps forward and pulling the messenger up by the back of his collar.

"Captain," the runner gasped, "it's the garrison. Something in it… something in it… exploded. Bits of stone and wood went everywhere; the houses up against and across the square lit up like tinder. We need to get to the water, fast!"

That being done, Lowan dropped the man, surveyed the crowd with a sweep of his gaze. "Alright, people," he began with crisp, arrogant authority. "Back to your homes. We're putting the city on lockdown; I will have men patrolling the streets. Don't try anything funny." He nodded to the guardsmen at the alienage gate. "Go on, open it. It's not like there's enough elven rats left in that place to cause a fuss."

As Lowan marched on with the majority of his men, Katriel sucked in a breath between her teeth. "We were hoping that thug would be inside the garrison when it blew up," she hissed an unasked for explanation to Eliante. "With him dead, the place would've been bedlam, but now…"

"But now what will they do?" Eliante finished, as pale with anxiety as Katriel was.

"They'll go to ground," was the quick response, "or they'll come to us. Whichever works best. But you and I; our plan stays the same. Come on." She began to pull Eliante toward the open alienage gate and then abruptly stopped and turned back. With a sideways smirk, she added, "And do try and look somewhat more like a commoner and somewhat less like a noble. It's no wonder they caught you at the Vigil."

Eliante opened her mouth –to set the record straight or condemn Anders for blabbing in the first place (it had to have been him; who else couldn't be trusted to keep his mouth shut when a pretty girl was listening?) –but before she could say anything, Katriel had pulled her toward the gate. And toward the guards that had opened it.

"But—"

"Trust me."

Trust no one, her father had told her as he bled out in the larder, a victim of his own misplaced trust and Eliante obeyed as best she could. Following Katriel in their mission was hardly a larger breach of that deathbed pact than anything she had done before –and much smaller than whatever Fergus thought he was doing, doing the Grey Wardens' dirty work for them.

Besides, how was she supposed to stop being a noble? How was she supposed to stop being Eliante Cousland? She had been born to play that part and bred to it; the one time she had tried to shed her skin for another's, it had ended in abysmal failure in the depths of a dungeon. And she could not become her parents' daughter in reality as well as name without acknowledging where she had come from. She could not change if she did not know what she was changing from in the first place. She was the daughter of honorable, decent, moral people; it should only follow that by emulating them, she should become all of those things too. She would have almost objected to playing at rebel if her father had not done it himself, long ago against the Orlesians.

"State your business," ordered the guard at the gates who was overseeing the wagons of water barrels now being conveyed through the alienage to the garrison.

In response, Katriel pushed her hood and hair away from her ears, revealing her heritage to an outsider for the first time that day. "We're maids in the bann's estate out east," she replied in an accent not her own, eyes wide and innocent. "The lord said 'e didn't need us anymo', so we've come back home. We were just inside the city when we 'eard about the lockdown. Please, serah, we don't want t' cause any trouble."

"Family name?" asked the guard, checking a printed registry he retrieved from his belt.

"Melanthor," she answered without skipping a beat and then shivered, shifting from foot to foot. "Please, serah; we just want t' go back home before our family starts wondering."

"That's the family of the knife-ear that got gutted in Denerim," whispered the questioner's fellow guard to him. Eliante stole another glance at Katriel; the woman didn't bat an eye.

"Nasty story, that," agreed the first guard and then looked to the two women. "Don't you worry: now that the good arl's come into power, none of that will be happening anymore," he said to them in a tone of misplaced goodwill. "See what good he's already done by letting those nice mages come and take a look at the lot of you for your health?"

Knowing the rumored truth, Eliante wanted to gag. But Katriel, playing her part, merely nodded and bobbed an eager curtsey. "I certainly know what a man he is," she agreed before grabbing Eliante's hand once again and pulling them both through the makeshift blockade and past the water wagons.

"How'd you know that name would get us through?" Eliante asked her softly as they turned a corner into an alley. "Do you know them?"

"Once," was Katriel's response and that was all she would say on the matter as she twisted a pathetically thin silver ring around the fourth finger of her left hand, the metal's poor quality turning her skin grey-green all around the band. "You have to understand how these games work. You can't take the world on by being ferocious; sometimes you have to actually use your head and think. You learn that, growing up in an alienage," she added offhandedly and Eliante, rather than being offended, thought about the laws that prohibited elves from bearing arms and, by that token, how it had hardly seemed to deter the Tabris twins.

The alley opened onto open space, a strange sight amidst all of the houses stacked against and sometimes on top of one another like a child's building blocks. The narrow corridors of streets spoke to the overcrowding as well; while cities could always expand their borders, an alienage remained the same size regardless of population growth. Of course, if one judged by the shattered windows and broken locks that decorated once-furnished homes, it seemed that much of these pathetic houses were now empty.

But what Eliante was really looking forward to see was the massive tree that Lady Landra's maid had once described to her, a gorgeous ancient oak spreading its branches high above the day to day squalor of poverty-stricken life. But instead, all there seemed to be at the heart of the community was a…

"Did that used to be…" she started to ask, looking at a stump large enough to be a small stage.

"Firewood," was Katriel's curt, dismissive answer. "It sometimes happens."

The alienage was quiet, peaceful in comparison to the rivers of people and wagons flowing through the main part of Highever in panic, but it seemed to Eliante the peace of a graveyard, something akin to the Avvar crypts deep within the Vigil. Shutters were shut tight. Gates were blown ajar by the winds of winter. Indeed, there would have been more cheer in a crypt; at least there, there might be the sense that those to whom the interred ashes had once belonged to were well-thought of and well-missed. It did not seem to Eliante that anyone was mourning the disappearing city elves.

There was a single zone of activity in the midst of the barren city sector. A suite of buildings built close against one another stood not far from the felled alienage tree, manned by a pair of guardsmen that had lingered despite the chaos caused by Malcolm's scheme and a few olive-skinned strangers in exotic robes that seemed to Eliante to be most eccentric in design: heavy gold-inlaid embroidery, enameled cowls, and tuffs of fur and feathers at the shoulders and belt. But if she was caught gazing dumbstruck at what must be the Tevinter foreigners, the once-over was repaid in full. But it was not Eliante that the taller healer fixed his golden, hawk-like gaze upon. It was not Eliante at all.

"You there," he called out in authoritative, accented tones, "elven lass with the fair hair. Let me take a look at you."

To Eliante's surprise, Katriel slipped her slender hand from her companion's and obeyed, stepping forward toward the healer and tilting her chin upward just so, so that the man could get a good measure of her, yet keeping her eyes trained carefully on the front step of the 'healing house.'

"Oh, dear," the mage –he must have been a mage –said, clicking his tongue against his teeth dispassionately, "oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear. Poor lass; poor lass indeed."

"Why, what's the matter?" Katriel said, her voice little more than a deferential murmur.

"Oh, poor dear," he said again and Eliante felt a tick of annoyance at the repetition. "It seems… no, it is nearly too terrible to say aloud, almost as though to will it into being."

"Get on with it," muttered one of the lingering guards, his eyes glancing from one corner of the house's courtyard to another. "There's a score of buildings on fire, if you hadn't heard."

"That has little to do with the Maker's service being conducted here," answered the Tevinter mage sharply and then turned his attention back to Katriel. "My dear, it seems you have contracted the elven plague by some means."

"How can that be?" Katriel questioned dully and Eliante thought it sounded rather like the younger woman was an unskilled player reciting lines from memory. "I've only just gotten here."

"Perhaps the stress of these events within the city had triggered a premature response in you," was the smooth answer. "Please, I must have you quarantined for the sake of the others."

The request seemed to fall a little flat, since the alienage was so empty. But Katriel did not call his bluff. She merely lifted her gaze to meet the healer's, eyes wide and beseeching. "And you'll help me get better?"

The mage was quite taken. "Oh, yes," he promised. "But you must do exactly as I say. I may order you to bed for days at a time."

"Then I am in your debt," Katriel replied, lowering her eyes modestly once more as though the honor was too great to bear.

Still smiling engagingly, the mage held ajar the makeshift hospital door and Katriel made as though to enter. Unable to help herself, Eliante took a step forward. "Wait—"

The guard blocked her path. "You want the best for your friend," he said and it wasn't a question.

Eliante looked over his armored shoulder at Katriel. The elven girl still smiled benignly back at her. "Be of good faith, sister," she said, the oddly formal words sounding out like lines in a court masque.

But something flickered from beneath half-lowered eyelashes and Malcolm's warning about Katriel rang once more in the forefront of Eliante's mind: "She's got something… vicious about her." And she stepped back, deferring, and let her companion, her last companion since Maker only knew the whereabouts of the others, disappear into the darkness of the slavers' hospital.

The guard was patting her shoulder heavily, awkwardly. "Now you run along home now," he advised. "She'll come back to you when she's good and well again."

"Of course, she will," Eliante replied, the words flowing out of her with strange smoothness. "Excuse me."

She didn't go home; she had no home to go to, she realized even as she stood in the city of her birth and youth. Instead, she turned the corner around the side of the hospital and found her way to another abandoned hovel two doors down. Carefully, methodically, she pried the lowest boards from over the closed and unlocked side door, glancing over one shoulder every so often to see if the guard had followed to look after her. Finally, she nudged the door ajar and crouched, maneuvering herself beneath the higher boards crisscrossing the doorframe, and entered the house's interior.

All around were the tokens of a life abandoned; that which remained after looters had no doubt pillaged the place. There was a blackened and burnt pot nestled in the ashes of a cooking fire, a bedframe stripped of mattress and blanket, a rag doll tossed in a corner. It seemed to uninformed eyes that the owners had not fallen sick, but simply gotten up and walked away. But the most important part and the thing Eliante fixed her gaze on was the rickety flight of stairs that dominated one back corner of the floor plan.

She climbed them quickly and found to her great relief that it was just as she had suspected: the second floor possessed a window that led out onto the roof of the next house and, being that the buildings were so cramped together, that that roof led to another window on the other side: the upstairs window of the Tevinter healing house.

Carefully, carefully, carefully, she unbound the shutters and pushed them ajar. The tiles of the roof stop were cracked, splintered, and scattered, so she knew she would have to take her time crossing the short distance between windows, lest a tile slide away and hit the ground, alerting guards and mages alike. Delicately, she climbed through the window frame and lightly placed one foot onto the roof after the other, wondering all the while what Katriel was doing within the hospital ahead.

Soundlessly inching across the crumbling roof top was slow work, but eventually Eliante finally made it to the other side and pressed her palms against the closed shutters in relieved certainty that she had made it. Carefully, she withdrew a stiletto of a knife from her belt and wiggled the pinprick of a blade through the tiny gap between the shutters, maneuvering the point back and forth until she met resistance and heard the click of the clasp on the other side coming undone. With distinct movements, she pried the shutters apart, doors opening toward her, and dropped into the hospital's interior.

The first thing she saw was the absence of beds. It took another moment for her mind to truly manifest and process the existence of the empty cages in their place.

Quickly, she crossed to the trap door in the floor some distance away that no doubt led into the main room below: the room Katriel must have been kept in. She wondered how long the pretense of healing was kept up with new "patients" and barely noticed when a sheet of parchment stuck to her foot. Distracted, she started to shake it off but in the end pulled the paper from the sole of her boot, quickly scanning it: Bring three females to the ships tonight. We need to meet our quota. Round up every elven male you see and bring him to me. –D.M.

A muffled gasp of pain, unrecognizable as male or female, drew her attention away. She stuffed the slip of vellum into her jacket and threw open the trapdoor's latch, daggers in hand as she stormed down the stairs, but it was all already over.

Katriel, center stage, was withdrawing her own slender blade from the ribs of the healer who had insisted on her entrance, blood turning the copper-colored material of her shirt beneath her leather jerkin a new color of red. Casually, she glanced up at Eliante and the older girl realized that the mage –magister, probably –was hardly the only corpse in the chamber, merely the freshest and seemingly only by moments. Scattered all around were two other bodies: one male, one female, both adorned in the strange robes and their lifeblood. Eliante looked from the bodies to Katriel's impassive expression and in that moment truly believed Malcolm's claim that the young elf had killed Vaughn Kendalls and all his men.

"You use your head," Katriel said blithely, continuing their conversation from before they had met the "healers" and she had been taken in, "and then you can be ferocious."

But before Eliante could open her mouth to reply, the front door started to shake with the abuse of someone trying to break past the wooden bar that barred entrance from the inside. Wordlessly, Eliante and Katriel moved close together, facing the door, weapons at the ready as they covered each other's blind spots.

The door hinges splintered and the wooden boards gave way to the intruders as they burst forward into the house. Eliante's grip tightened on her knife, but as the dust settled and she blinked past the sunlight, she realized it wasn't Howe's men. It wasn't more Tevinter mages. Far from it.

"You're late," Katriel declared flatly, fixing Malcolm with a gaze of ultimate disdain. Behind him was Katriel's brother Adrian with his shortbow and to the thief's left…

"We crossed the city as fast as we could," Nathaniel answered, lowering his own longbow as he spoke, grey eyes flickering between Eliante and Katriel. "You seem to have done well enough in our absence. Slavers indeed." However he felt about the conclusion, about what must have been his father's work, could not be gleaned from his words nor from his voice.

"We're far from finished," Eliante interjected and held up the slip of paper she had found upstairs. "It doesn't stop here. There must be a discreet way to the docks from this house, like Mal's smuggling passage."

"Where are Daniel and the mage?" Katriel questioned and Eliante thought with amusement of Anders' reaction when he learned he was just "the mage" in the elven girl's eyes.

"They've already left the city," Nathaniel answered as Malcolm began to prowl the room like a cat exploring new surroundings. "The fool got himself hurt and it figured we would send the healer with him. We'll catch up at the abandoned farmstead not far out."

"Found it," came Malcolm's declaration from the backroom he had discovered. Eliante, Nathaniel, Adrian, and Katriel followed into the cramped back bedroom where the thief presented to them an unassuming yet unfurnished bunk bed stacked up against the wall. "Personally, I'm a fan of knowing what I'm sleeping on top of," he drawled, "but even I'll admit that this could be useful."

He kicked the toe of his boot against the bedframe, triggering an audible click as the slats of the lower bed sprung open like the lid of a trunk, opening up a stairwell that led downward to Maker only knew where. "Pretty broad passageway, I'd wager," he remarked carelessly. "Built for the big goods, maybe even some livestock. I doubt the Tevinter magisters think that anything much has changed since those days."

Neither Adrian nor Katriel cracked a ghost of a smile, each looking down into the darkness as though their own deaths awaited them there.

"It smells like the sea," Eliante offered.

"Opens up onto a beach, would be my guess," Malcolm agreed. "From there there'd be dinghies and the dinghies would lead to ships and the ships would lead to…"

"To Tevinter," Nathaniel finished darkly, "and then Tevinter gold would magically appear in my father's pocket, no doubt."

"Let's make sure none of that gets to where they want it to go," Eliante replied and was the first to step down into the tunnel below.

She had never spent so much time as a bird before.

It was too risky to reassume human form, not when Emilia knew no one in this city and too many seemed to know her. Arl Howe had no doubt sent men after her, even if he did not quite understand what she had done, how she had made her escape. Few did understand, and she preferred to keep it that way.

Riordan had been one of those very few, perhaps the only living witness now. La Reine Blanche had known though, as she seemed to know everything; how else would she have known to gift Emilia with a set of midnight blue robes with those very specific runes embroidered in silver thread, an inscription designed for the sole purpose of allowing the closeted mage to transform and back without leaving behind or appearing without clothing. It was a kind gift, a thoughtful gift, or it would have been if its very message had not been to shake and rattle her so that she had stood there on the terrace in Jader with the gift in hand, sweating with the knowledge that the woman knew her secret, that she still was not safe.

Still, the woman knew. There was nothing to be done about it save make use of the elegant gift that was a warning as much as it was a boon. But Riordan knew too, and she had thus put her trust in him. She had put her trust in the Grey Wardens; that they would keep her safe just as she helped them keep the world safe from the terrors lurking underground.

Now they had put their trust in her, as had he.

She prayed to the Maker they weren't hurting him, the poor, honest fool, too dedicated, too distracted to fence Howe's questions.

But then again, Emilia had hardly done such an admirable job herself.

She thought, as she perched upon a branch of the alienage tree and watched as elves stood shouting for access to a healing house run by Tevinter mages, that it was rather evident that she could not do this on her own. Some of what Rendon Howe had said during their "dinner" was true enough; no one in this country would trust an Orlesian Grey Warden on her own.

She was going to have to find someone else.

Someone was sitting in the tree, perched upon a branch of his own. She fluttered slightly closer to get a better look: pale blonde hair, olive-hued skin, a swirling tattoo across one well-defined cheekbone. An elf: unremarkable in an alienage save for his good looks. But what made him something more was the armor beneath his own common-spun jerkin and the knife he twirled between a few fingers.

The stranger in the tree glanced up at her and she could not help but cock her head to one side in a mirror of his own quizzical expression. "You, my bird friend," he said in a voice dominated by a smooth Antivan accent, "are much more perceptive than any of these poor fools below."

Unable to help herself once more, she chirped a reply. The green emerald dangling from a long leather cord about his neck pulsed once with an enchantment and the elf looked at her with new eyes. "You are no bird," he said suddenly, the statement fluid and declarative. Still, she did not move and the stranger leaned forward. "What you have seen, I wonder?" he said softly.

I have seen what I've seen, she thought, thinking of the changeable nature of Rendon Howe's long face, and I see what I see, she finished, hearing the elves clamor for healing below.

It was just as Nathaniel had predicted. Soon enough, the ground turned sandy and gritty beneath their feet and fresh sea air rushed forward to greet them. Malcolm and Katriel took point as the passageway widened, catching Eliante in the middle between them and Nathaniel and Adrian at her back.

"Feels like a storm out to sea," Malcolm remarked, sandy hair blown back by the wind rushing down the tunnel.

"If they see us and leave dock now, there's a good chance the ships will be lost off the coast," Nathaniel replied, drawing his collar higher against his chin against the chill.

"With the slavers on them," Katriel added.

"With our people on them," Adrian said quietly. "That's a lot of dead."

"The slavers have to die," Eliante replied, equally quiet, "one way or another. We don't hold the city; if we drive them out, we can't keep them out if Howe's men invite them right back in. And we need to find proof that they did bring them in in the first place."

"Then we get onto the ships, kill the magisters, and keep them from taking off," Malcolm said decisively, "'sides, t'would be a tremendously foolish endeavor to take on, sailing into a storm off the Amaranthine coast. They're clearly not from around here."

And yet it seemed they themselves were willing to ignore their own education, even Eliante and Nathaniel who had once longed to go out to sea and were thoroughly chided with the haunting account of King Maric's disappearance. Adrian drew up a dinghy with a long cord tied to an iron spoke buried deep into the chalky limestone bedrock even as the wind blew harder; they all crowded into the rickety little craft even as the water became choppier.

Malcolm took the oars as Nathaniel stepped out into knee deep water, shoving against the prow to push the vessel into deeper water. He clambered back into the boat, boots and pants soaked, as the first wave crashed too close, seawater sloshing into the vessel and against their clothes, boots, and skin. Katriel took the task of bailing the water with a small bucket she had found beneath the furthest back seat even as another wave soaked the dinghy's passengers all over again.

Driving forward past the waves was slow, difficult, and cold work, but it wasn't impossible and they were all determined to prove it so. Eventually the dinghy moved past the roughest water and miraculously they were all still within the boat. Waves still smacked the wooden sides of the craft, but Malcolm was strong and dedicated in his rowing and, when he failed, Nathaniel and Adrian both took turns while Eliante and Katriel bailed the seawater sloshing around their feet. Soon enough, the prow bumped up against the larger ship's hull and Malcolm stood up on the bench to grab at the nets and rigging that were hung in swags conveniently low enough for their reach.

Like strange spiders or perhaps pirates, they scaled the rigging two at a time, the choppy sea swelling beneath them as the first of the rain began to fall from the purple-grey sky above. From her perch clinging to the ropes, Eliante glanced downward and saw the now empty dinghy swallowed up by the rain and waves. There would be no going back that way.

She ungracefully made it up onto the deck, aided by the helpful hands of both Nathaniel and Malcolm. The ship rocked beneath her feet and she felt the contents of her stomach rock with it as the rain, a hard downpour, plastered her hair against her scalp.

Katriel, drenched clothes hanging heavy around her petite frame, looked like a drowned kitten as she shouted over the gale, "Here," and cut the ropes holding a tarp tight across what seemed a large, square hatch free. With her brother's help, they pulled the heavy, slick sheet aside and peered down into the darkness just visible between the grid of the grated trapdoor.

Eliante joined them and saw eyes blinking back up at her like stars in the heavens from deep below, wide and fearful. "We're going to get you out," Adrian told the no doubt terrified elves packed tight below deck, his voice slow and clear.

There was a murmured wave of concern from the prisoners as rainwater splattered down through the grate hard and fast and Katriel grabbed her twin's wrist. "Pull the sheet back over," she ordered. "That hull will fill up fast if we don't."

With Eliante's assistance, he did as she advised. Malcolm, feet strangely steady against the pitching deck, shouted a warning as he pulled his sword and dagger free from their sheathes; Eliante looked up to see a series of soldiers in alien armor –the sloping points of the shoulders and the straps at the bottom of the tunic-like chestpiece was hardly Fereldan in design –rush forward from the rear of the full-rigged ship, near where the wheel must be located.

Arrows sprouted like flowers with fletched feathers for petals from the chin and neck of the first two defenders and they hit the deck hard, blood mixing with rainwater. As Nathaniel and Adrian pulled fresh arrows from their backs, Malcolm and Katriel charged, strange savagery in the movements of their blades and in their eyes. Back to back, they cut down one opponent after another; fearsome where there should have been fear instead.

For her part, as the Tevinter soldiers were drawn further and further forward toward the ship's prow, Eliante dodged the defenders, boots slipping and sliding in the slick of rainwater and blood until she toppled forward against the stairs to the upper deck, the rain loud against the deck and in her ears.

Perhaps guessing her purpose, Nathaniel loosed one more arrow and then followed, leaving Katriel, Adrian, and Malcolm to deal with the diminishing force of slaver soldiers. "The magister?" he shouted above the gale of wind.

"He's got to be somewhere!" she shouted back. Another wave of harder rain drove her hair into her face and she shoved it back, sputtering. "Hopefully not on the other ship," she added with a glance of trepidation across the narrow channel to the other Tevinter vessel that was bobbing violently about in the waves like a toy boat in the rapids of a creek. "Because I don't know how we'd get to it."

"The dinghy's scrap," he agreed as lightning broke the sky.

And soon this ship might be too, Eliante could not help but think as Katriel and Malcolm stared up at the sky, their enemies dead upon the deck.

Another wave crashed against the portside and they all stumbled, desperately trying to regain their footing. "Don't worry!" Malcolm shouted up at them, hazel eyes squinted through the din of the wind, rain, and waves. "The Tevinter bastard's coming to us!"

Shocked into action by the thief's revelation, Eliante looked back at the other ship and saw the true source of the lightning: it was no ordinary storm. Another bolt hit the mast, a crackling boom that momentarily deafened them all, and Eliante cupped her hands over her ears in speechless agony as she saw the waves of the ocean drawn up from their depths, consolidating into crackling and splintering ice, creating a bridge that connected the two ships and nearly rolled theirs underwater with the sudden force.

Electricity and water at his command –a most dangerous and potent combination –the Tevinter magister moved forward across the ice bridge in fluid, fast steps, hitting the deck with a resounding thud that conjured up cries of fear and concern from the elves below.

Grey of hair, beard, eyes, and robes, the magister uncurled his spine, standing tall and regarding them all –Adrian, Katriel, Malcolm, Nathaniel, and Eliante –with a clear, amused gaze. The storm itself seemed to quiet with his words as he said, "Now, if you'll indulge me, I would like to know exactly who you are."

"Introductions are a two way street," Eliante found herself calling back, curious despite herself. "I'd like to know why you're in Ferelden."

The magister returned her hostile words with a humoring smile. "I am Magister Danarius of Minrathous," he answered smoothly, "here to recover stolen property, as well as perform a favor to a dear friend of mine. Caladrius will be most pleased when he hears I've found the arl of Amaranthine's son and the mayfly rebel he's been chasing down. We might be able to negotiate an even better deal."

"None of these people belong to you!" Katriel shouted back, positively feral in stance and voice. "And neither does Fenris!"

Eliante felt a jolt of surprise at the familiarity and the strange name that Katriel loosed; that would have to be explored later. Danarius only appeared mildly surprised. "So that's how you found out about our little business venture," he deduced. "No matter; that knowledge will end with you. I'll explain the loss of profit to Caladrius later. And we just won't tell the good arl about his son's death, but no doubt he'll be thrilled to hear about the demise of the last Cousland at sea. Such a tragedy."

"He's going to try and sink us!" Adrian shouted even as he loosed arrow after arrow at the magister's retreat back to the other vessel.

"I'll turn the ship!" Malcolm snarled back. "Somebody tries to sink us, I'll be damned if we don't try and sink them right back."

"There are more elves on that other ship!" Katriel snapped.

"We don't know that for sure," Malcolm replied grimly as he took the wheel, "and even so, it's them or us and all of the elves over here."

"Somebody cut the anchor free," Nathaniel was saying. "We can outrun them as we fire; our ship's smaller."

"It's practically a hurricane!" Malcolm snapped.

"I don't plan to die at the bottom of the ocean," Eliante said coolly back. "Turn the ship around. Adrian, you've still got explosives left over?" Adrian nodded. "Bind them to arrows. You and Nate shoot for the other ship's masts; if we cripple it, we've got a better chance."

"They might not work in the rain," Nathaniel warned.

"A small chance is better than none. Do it. Mal, get us out of here."

"If you're going to order me around like that, you could at least buy me dinner first," the thief answered as lightning struck the topmast of their ship and Adrian's explosive arrows found their homes in the masts of the other. What used to be the crow's nest splintered and fractured, its remains tumbling down against the deck, but they were moving, the wind of the storm caught in their sails.

"Sailing in a Maker-be-damned hurricane," Malcolm was muttering. "I don't believe this."

"He's leaving!" Katriel called out from where she stood on the top deck, peering through the rain. "I can see the bastard. He thinks he's crippled us and left us for dead, and he's leaving. Thank the Maker."

Eliante lifted her heels from the floor, looked, and she saw too. With a heavy sigh of relief, she fell back down flat-footed against the deck. With a sigh to echo hers, Nathaniel came up behind her, wrapping his arms around her waist. "Now all that's left is to limp home," he said.

"Wherever that might be," Malcolm called back. "Any of you know of a port in all of the north that'd be friendly to a Tevinter slaver ship top full of elves and helmed by the most wanted people in Ferelden?"

"Make for Brandel's Reach to the east," Nathaniel replied. "There's got to be a map and compass in one of these cabins."

"And can we in the Maker's name finally let the elves out of the hold?" Katriel snapped, as exhausted and exasperated as the rest of them.

"Of course," Eliante replied, untangling herself from Nathaniel, "although they might want to stay below deck, even if the storm's quieted some. And you have some explaining to do."

Katriel sighed. "So I figured," she replied wryly. "Can we dry off first, though?"

The chapter's title is taken from Oberon's line in A Midsummer Night's Dream 4.1: "Come, my queen, take hands with me / And rock the ground whereon these sleepers be"

I don't see why Fenris couldn't have come further south to Ferelden. It seems his goal has been to get as far away from Tevinter as possible and the choice to stand and fight at Danarius's supposed mansion in Kirkwall was an extremely recent one. Also I don't see why Danarius couldn't be friends with Caladrius. But more on all of that in future chapters.

I also wanted to make Tevinter Magisters a little more frightening than they seem to be in-game. The confrontations with Caladrius in DA:O and Hadriana and Danarius in DA2 always struck me as a little lackluster.

Also, in theory, this /could/ be the same storm that shipwrecks the lovely Isabela and the qunari off of the coast of Kirkwall. I'm not sure if the timing works perfectly, but it might. Happy coincidence? Maybe. Like I said, not sure about the timing.

Reviews appreciated as always, especially with these chapters that are getting further and further away from the canon.