"I know of no one called 'Naishe', old or not," Aveline said, eyeing the age-bent grannie, huddled in a shawl from under which a few grey-streaked locks straggled. One of her eyes was bleary and white, and her wrinkles were only accentuated by a thick layer of flaking makeup—ugh. "If you wish to enter the Hawke's Tower, you must give up any and all weapons you have on your person, and I will check to see that you have done so by searching you."
"If it must be, then it must be—just don't go enjoying yourself too much, Man-Hands." The first part of it was said in the quavery, crackly soprano of age, but the rest was a distinctly younger, sultrier alto.
"Isabella?!" Aveline exclaimed, and then recovered herself. "I always thought your lifestyle would be prematurely ageing, but I must say I never expected it to work quite this fast."
"Hush! Very funny. Keep your voice down, Big Girl, and let me in, why don't you?" Once inside, the pirate threw off the shawl—she had donned a long drab dress as part of the disguise, but nothing would disguise those breasts. "The first thing I'm going to need is to wash—this make-up itches—and the next is to eat. I haven't had a bite since before dawn. Where's Hawke?"
"At the theater with half the household, or close to it. What did you do to your eye?" Aveline wondered.
Isabella reached up and plucked a scrap of whitish stuff from her eyeball. "It's that bit of membrane you get inside an eggshell. Old rogue's trick, that one. Ashes combed into the hair, a lot of thick gooey make up that cracks badly as it dries, and hey, presto! Suddenly you're forty years older."
"What mess have you gotten yourself into this time?" Aveline asked.
"I'm saving it for Hawke," Isabella replied.
"Must be the first time you ever 'saved it' for anybody," retorted the redhead reflexively, but her heart wasn't in it from the tone of her voice. "Coming here in disguise, not wanting to talk—this is going to be very bad, isn't it?
"Urgh! I need to wash before my face falls off," Isabella evaded. "Where's the water, or do I have to strip down and wash in the fountain?"
"There's a washbasin through here. Julia, can you raid the kitchens for whatever's handy, and bring it—bring it out into the courtyard. Thanks." Aveline directed.
"So, tell me about everything I've missed," the pirate commanded as she reappeared, hair streaming wet, rubbing off the last traces of the make-up. "and don't be stingy with the details. Why are you sitting home alone if Hawke's at the theater? Doesn't she need a body guard anymore?"
"I saw the play earlier this week, and Fenris is on duty tonight."
"Fenris? You mean Mr. Lean and Lanky Elf himself? He came back?" Isabella's eyes gleamed.
"Leandra, too," Aveline confirmed.
"Have he and Hawke peeled off each other's smalls yet?" the pirate inquired as she picked up a sandwich.
"Not that I'm aware of. In fact—I don't know when I noticed it exactly, but for at least the last couple of months, he's been treating her as if she'd break with rough handling."
"Maybe she'd like that," Isabella replied impishly. "I know I would."
"You don't seem surprised that he returned."
"I'm not," Isabella took another bite of sandwich, chewed a little and said, through the food. "Those two—he was wanting to board her from the start, and she would have been happy to strip the sails off his mainmast, if only she wasn't burdened by scruples, poor thing." She swallowed. "No, it's Leandra's return that surprises me more. I would have thought she'd prefer life as a noblewoman of Kirkwall again—I don't suppose Carver came back, too? There's a mast worth the rigging. Lovely big laddie, that one."
"Wha—no, I don't want to hear it. What I do want to know is why you ran into such trouble on the way from here to Kirkwall. With the amount of money Twyla paid you, I would have thought you would be more careful of her family."
Isabella nearly choked on the next bite of her sandwich for laughing, and with streaming eyes, had to wash the mouthful down with wine. "Oh, don't make me do that! Do you want to kill me? Don't answer that! Hawke didn't pay me extra for their passage to keep them out of trouble, she paid me to get them into trouble. It was a scheme we worked up between the two of us. She didn't want the boys to feel like dead weight on the voyage after she talked up how they had to protect Leandra and all that. So I made sure that we encountered just enough trouble to need their assistance. Any further assistance they needed to bolster their manhoods was…on the house."
"Really?" Aveline mused on that. "So Carver took you up on it, and Fenris didn't. Interesting."
"I think it would have been much more interesting if he had—So, what else has been going on?"
"To begin with, when Leandra and Fenris returned, they brought three others with them…"
Sometime later:
"The idea behind the noodle shops was not to make food that would make Orlesian critics weep for joy, just to provide a meal that would be nutritious, cheap, and good, to as many people as possible, as easily and quickly as possible. The initial investment was large, but Varric says that at the rate things are going, the shops will turn a profit by the end of this year. I've taken to patrolling the immediate neighborhood to be sure things are quiet, and at the noodle shop on our corner, people queue up around the block for soup. It's hard to listen to what they say sometimes. They talk about how wonderful it is to get as much meat in one bowl as they're used to getting in an entire week, and they're only talking about a few ounces of pork. The poverty here is—shameful."
"So Hawke's still going around doing good wherever she can, is she?" Isabella sounded more speculative than anything else.
"Yes, but don't mistake compassion for weakness, because it isn't. Oh, the last thing I meant to tell you! I nearly forgot. Hawke shaved her head." Aveline finished.
"Shaved her head? But she had such lovely hair!" Isabella had finished every drop of wine and now was picking up crumbs from the tray with a wetted forefinger.
"It was during the worst of the heat—I can call for more food if you're that hungry, you know." The kitchen had not been stingy, but Isabella certainly had…appetites.
"The cake was just so delicious I didn't want to waste even the tiniest bit. Is she still shaving it? I can't wait to see."
"No, she's letting it grow back. She looks almost boyish now." Aveline smiled a little.
"Can't wait to see that," the pirate leered. "Now, this lad Feynriel—."
"His voice has only just begun to break, Isabella, so it's hands off for a while longer. Forever, if possible." There was a sound at the gates, and Aveline got up to welcome the theatergoers home, Isabella at her heels.
"Yet what manner of message does it send when the most charismatic character is the villain of the piece?" asked Fenris. "The hero was dull and flat."
"That's why the central character is often called the 'protagonist', because they aren't always heroic." Hawke replied. "There are anti-heroes, who are the opposite of everything the hero ought to be, and sometimes ordinary people are thrust into the central role. Then—Isabella? Is that you? What on earth are you wearing that for?"
"She's in trouble," Aveline explained.
The theater party had included not only Leandra, Hawke and Fenris, but also Varric, Merrill, Anders, Feynriel, Dagna, and Orana, many of whom had never met Isabella. (Hawke had bought out half the first tier to accommodate them.) After introductions were performed all around, Isabella screwed up her face.
"As Aveline said, sweet thing, I am in, well, a bit of a bind. I was thinking, 'Who do I know who likes nothing better than to help out, but Hawke?', and here I am. You see, I've been involved in moving goods for various…entrepreneurs and the…agent who arranged my last cargo offered such a good payment, provided no questions were asked. Yes, yes, I should have been suspicious, but I owed a pile of money already. I went to the meeting place, and…to make a long story short, they were Blight refugees. Like you."
"You mean they were going to be sold into slavery," Anders stated, harshly. "Lured with promises of jobs and homes for them and their families."
"Yes. You know, you look familiar…" She eyed the mage. "Anyhow, they didn't know—not yet. There were about a hundred and fifty of them, all told, both human and elven. Some were children and babes in arms, and there were even a handful of oldsters. Even I can see that's wrong. But—I owed so much, I couldn't just turn Castillon down flat. So I took them on board, and set off for here." Isabella paused for a moment, and Fenris made a growling sound in his throat.
"Yet you did not bring them here, or if you did, you have not turned them over to the slave pens," Twyla said, "because the chances that I would help you after that are pretty much nil, and you're smarter than that."
Isabella laughed, briefly. "Yes, but only just. I set them ashore in a cove I know, and then there was a storm. I lost my ship, lost most of my men, only just escaped with my life, and here I am. You see, I meant to go back for them—that cove is days away from any settlement, and they've no food, no shelter. I can't get another ship to save my own life, Castillon's people are after me, and they're out there camping on bare rock. Please, Hawke. Help me. Help them."
Twyla was silent for a long moment.
"You do not mean to refuse?" Fenris began.
"What? No, of course not. I was making plans. Here's what we're going to do first. Isabella, you are going to send Castillon a message, however it's done, telling him you know a magister who hates auctions, is tired of secondhand goods, and wants to buy all your cargo in one huge job lot, as it were. However, this buyer doesn't like to do business with strangers, so you'll have to broker the deal. Tell him that you might be able to take this person for much more than the going rate, and what does he think you should charge? Appeal to his greed—I'm sure you'll know how best to do so. Get him so interested he calls off his hounds."
"But he'll want to know details, names, credit rating," Isabella protested.
"He'll have them. You will tell him it's me."
A/N: and so it begins…