Previously: Returning from visiting the stricken Margery Aix, Hawke stops Silvie, one of Aurelia's followers, from attacking Orana. The following "conversation" reveals the truth about the pearl's real nature, to Hawke's horror.
And in the present, Orsino has a terrifying, bewildering encounter with a monstrous entity, one that Hawke seems to know far too much about.
Onward…
Note: This chapter contains semi-graphic depictions of injuries and horror.
Hawke's first instinct is to follow in the cry's wake. A fool's errand, given the silence that takes its place, but no one can accuse her of not loving her lost causes. She knows just the spell to use: a trick of her father's to send the mind's eye soaring. It wouldn't translate sound, or smell, but it makes use of a far subtler sight than her real eyes — and if any trace remains of the cry, or what silenced it, she might yet find it.
But that would mean leaving her body alone in the library with Silvie, who, even tied to a chair and half-drunk on elfroot, is still the enemy. Hawke might be a fool, but she's not a moron.
Unlike said tied-and-half-drunk woman, who's smiling, sticky and insouciant, into Hawke's speechlessness.
"Never expected this, did you, Rhyssa?" Silvie licks her lips, and winks. "Oh, I wish Aurelia could see your face, you look so —"
"Shut up, shut up." An egg. Maker help us all. Hawke drags both hands through her hair, yanking at the tangles till her fingers come away dark with loose strands. "You don't have a bloody idea what you've done."
Her voice splinters on the last word. Silvie, the idiot, takes that as a sign of weakness, and keeps smirking.
"You don't have to be so precious about it." She leans back in the chair, the tip of her tongue trapped now between her teeth. "You've eaten oysters, yes? It's just the same. You cut them open to get at the pearl. Our knives are just a little bigger."
How is it possible to look at someone with so much hate, and not see them drop dead on the spot? Hawke stares long enough at Silvie without saying a word that her little smirk starts to slip, and one of the burns near her eye begins to seep a thin, clear fluid.
"What?" she asks, in what's clearly meant to be a challenge. It fails, thanks to a quaver in her voice and the way she can't quite meet Hawke's eyes. "Can't say anything? I thought you'd at least try to have something witty. A disappointment, as always." She inhales, no doubt summoning a fresh rejoinder, but she glances up at Hawke's face, and she shudders, head to toe.
Hawke realizes, belatedly, that she's smiling. Not only that, but she's angry, a blinding, corrosive anger that puts all she's felt before to shame. Margery, the fight with Fenris, seeing Nettle slumped in the alley - nothing compares. No matter how far back she goes, she only remembers being this angry once, one bleak Fereldan winter when the twins broke the string of beads Father gave her for her birthday. How she'd screamed at them, tearing at Bethany's braids and slapping Carver till Mother pulled her away. How the twins wept, long into the night. And how long she'd sat on her bed, fists clenched, eyes dry, a voice in her head saying They deserved it.
The night ended with the twins creeping into her room, with smuggled bread and cheese in their pockets, and Carver had gathered up all the beads he could find. By then her anger had left, leaving her cold as yesterday's ashes, and the three of them had fallen asleep huddled about each other.
The difference, of course, was they hadn't meant to break anything. They were children, trapped inside, cold and hungry; Hawke cordially detests the phrase they didn't know any better, but here, and here only, it applies. Aurelia, along with Silvie and all her little minions, knew better, and didn't care.
Hawke blinks away the memory — tear-stained faces, Mother's sourdough bread, Bethany snoring against her shoulder — and slips her hand into her pocket.
Yes, says the old, long-buried voice. She deserves it. Make her hurt.
The sea likes that: it rises, roaring, deafening her as she pulls the last, heaviest bottle free. Her fingers touch the flower along the way, and the way the petals rasp against her skin curdles her stomach. She'll have to deal with that soon, won't she?
But then the bottle is free, berry-brown in the murky room, and her disgust vanishes. She'd forgotten how clear-eyed she felt all those years ago, how her anger burned away everything but the taste of blood and a faint ringing in her ears.
Silvie's eyes lock onto the bottle. Her breath whines out of her, and her face goes white, and then grey.
"You won't." Her eyes meet Hawke's, then roll back to the bottle, while the library air turns rank with the smell of her rising panic. "You're not that cruel."
"This morning, I'd have agreed with you." Hawke thumbs the cork out of the bottle, breathing the peaty smell and fighting the urge to laugh as Silvie whimpers. "And maybe tomorrow I'll regret it. Right now? I want you to choke."
Silvie shrieks, close-mouthed, as Hawke advances on her. Throwing the magebane in Silvie's face would be so symmetrical, just like something out of Varric's stories, but the rage tells her Closer, closer, so you can watch her face as it works.
Yes, she whispers back. Silvie kicks at her legs and succeeds only in rocking the chair back against the bookcase. She hits her head along the way, but her struggles don't stop, even when she bites her lip open and blood spatters down her robes. Kicking, gasping, thrashing, all to get away from Hawke and the bottle she holds high overhead.
"Oh, just stop it," Hawke snaps, her back tight and her voice sour as a dented bell. "You were so brave when you thought it was just death — why does this change anything?"
Silvie wheezes something, the words impossible to catch. Hawke leans in, earning herself a fresh muffled shriek, and hears the words clearly when Silvie moans in terror.
"Not again," she whispers. "Anything — please, just not that."
The first drop hovers at the lip of the bottle. Hawke freezes just before it falls, staring at Silvie in horrified silence.
You know of borders and certainty. Ketojan, standing at the cliff's edge, struck gold by the sunlight as he tipped his masked face to the sky — and then burning, in silence.
Oh, Maker. Of course Aurelia would need test subjects.
Her fury dies in a heartbeat. Killing Andric was done in defense, but even if she untied Silvie and handed her a knife, it would still be only vengeance. Whatever evil the woman has done, she's only done it out of dogged, undeserved loyalty.
"You're not even worth pitying," she says, while Ketojan's voice still rings in her ears. Without her anger, all that remains is the taste of blood in her mouth and a brand-new headache. But the border is uncrossed. She'll survive.
Letting go of the magebane bottle takes another breath. Satisfaction, symmetry — they'll wait, till it's Aurelia before her, though the sea thunders at the base of her skull in protest.
Just wait, she promises. It'll come. You'll have your child back, and justice, too.
Silvie's mask cracks clean through. A tear rolls down her burned cheek. "So our little game's over?" she asks, with a bad attempt at bravado. "Bored so easily?"
"You could say that." Hawke pulls her knife from her boot. Maker help her, she can't tell if she's more disgusted with herself or with Silvie. "Hold still."
Silvie, to her credit, doesn't flinch or close her eyes when Hawke approaches, though fresh sweat breaks out on her brow and her breath comes in little hitches. Hawke wrinkles her nose as a fresh wave of fear scents the room.
It takes cutting the third rope for Silvie to realize what's happening. "What — you — are we dueling, then? Rhyssa?"
The banter would be more convincing if she weren't trembling so. Hawke ignores the little sting when she hears her name, and keeps cutting.
"Or are you going to set your mabari on me? How Fereldan of you, I thought —"
"I'm always amazed none of you mad bastards ever know when to shut your holes." The last rope falls to the floor in a soft whisper of silk. "There. Up you get, time's wasting and you've got a long walk ahead of you."
Silvie just blinks at her, eyes cow-wide. Hawke sighs and grabs her by the arm, heaving her toward the stairs.
"You're not —"
"Killing you? What would be the point?" Hawke chews her tongue till the urge to shove Silvie down the stairs passes. "I mean, other than giving you the satisfaction of staining my eternal soul, or whatever you had in mind. It turns out I am a bad host, since I can't be bothered to give my guest what she wants."
She unlocks the library door one-handed, and pulls Silvie into the parlor. Anders and Merrill half-rise from their seats, but Hawke waves them back. "No, no, stay where you are, Silvie's just leaving. Aren't you, Silvie?"
Anders stares at her pop-eyed, which leaves the inevitable question to Merrill. "Hawke, what are you doing?"
"Just seeing our friend out. Say goodbye to Silvie, everyone!" Hawke singsongs, crossing the parlor at almost a run while Silvie struggles to stay on her feet. She does trip on one of the casks still lingering in the parlor, but Hawke just keeps pulling her along, feet slapping wetly on the flagstones one moment, then soundlessly the next. She bites her tongue again, willing the world to stay steady just a little longer.
The front door opens on a blast of cold air, followed by faint grey sunlight. Hawke squints — it seems the storm is holding off, for the moment — then shoves Silvie out the door. She tumbles down the steps and sprawls on the pavement.
"What are you doing?" she whispers. "You're mad. I'm — what do you want?"
Hawke smiles down at her. Third-best at first, and then second. And then, when Silvie is still staring at her, mouth open and tears making silent tracks down her face, her best, all teeth and red, red lips.
"You'd better hurry," she says, while Silvie cringes in on herself. "As I said, you've got a long walk ahead of you, wherever you're going."
"I can't go back to —"
"No, I don't suppose you can, can you? A pity. Where are you to go, then?" Hawke taps her chin, then tosses her head. "I don't care. But I'll tell you this for free — don't come back here. My hospitality's all run dry."
Silvie makes one last attempt at bravery, lifting her chin and sneering. "Shall I tell Aurelia you're coming?"
"If you're stupid enough to crawl back to her, by all means. I'm sure she knows that already." Hawke gives Silvie a little finger wave. "Better bundle up. It's going to be a chilly night."
She shuts the door without a second look, and doesn't bother to lock it. Instead, she presses her head to the wood and tries to breathe past the pressure behind her eyes.
You should have killed her.
"Maybe," she whispers. "But that solves nothing."
It would satisfy.
She can't argue with that, so she doesn't bother trying. Just keeps her head on the wood, breathing, until she hears a rustle behind her and turns to face Merrill and Anders.
"Are you all right?" Anders asks.
Hawke smiles. She gets it right; neither of them flinch. The flower shifts in her pocket. Before she can regret not asking Silvie when she had the chance, she walks straight to the fire and tosses it in. Like old paper, the petals curl into ash in seconds.
"Not remotely," she says. "But — I think you deserve to know why."
Telling Anders and Merrill takes three times as long as telling Fenris. The length can be blamed on several things: Orana insisting, with wobbly dignity, on feeding them as soon as she was let out of the back parlor, the storm's return crashing a few branches against the garden door. Mostly, it can be blamed on telling a story to two mages who can't help picking apart any mystery presented to them.
Hawke tries not to be too aware of her deficiencies, but up against a Circle mage — however hard Anders tried not to be such — and a Grey Warden, and the former First of Clan Sabrae, Hawke feels like she's been half-blind her whole life. Her father did his best, but with two mages under his roof and templars eager for promotion in Lothering, his best consisted of let's make sure the girls don't burn down the barn or create any sheep-revenants. If he'd lived long enough, maybe Hawke would have gotten a bit of theory in with all the lectures on control and compassion. But he hadn't, and now she has the painful honor of watching Merrill and Anders share look after look as she talks about the graffiti, and the sea, and the little pouch she pulled off Andric's body.
The pouch tugs most at her attention. A thin memory — sitting at the kitchen table, listening to Father tell a story after the twins were asleep — presents itself, then vanishes. If there's a connection, she wasn't fast enough to catch it. No surprise there.
"What?" she snaps, after watching her friends have a full conversation using only their eyebrows and curled lips. "Care to share with the poor idiot apostate?"
"You're not an idiot," Merrill moves her hand in a slow arc over the empty water jug. Thin light clings to her fingertips, refracting oddly against the water glasses, while the air against Hawke's face warms and dries. When Merrill lifts the jug, water sloshes merrily within.
Hawke smiles against her will. "One day you'll have to show me that trick."
"Oh, it's hardly a trick." Merrill returns the smile as she refills Hawke's glass. "It's like — hm. You know how to spin, right? You get all the loose woolly bits, and they're all spread out with air between them. So you give them a twist, and you keep building up the twist till all the air is pushed out. But you have to make sure you have a cup or bowl nearby, otherwise you just have a big puddle when you let go instead of nice wool thread."
"That…huh." Anders props his chin on his fist. "That makes a surprising amount of sense."
"I do that, sometimes," Merrill replies mildly.
"I didn't mean —"
"No, you didn't. But sometimes you do."
Hawke taps her fingernail against the edge of her plate — if they get started, she'll never be able to rein them back in. "We're a bit off the plot," she says, as the parlor clock strikes eight. Her heart twinges — eight in the evening, and Fenris is still gone — but she pushes ahead, ignoring the pang and the soreness in her throat. "I've got a few guesses about it, but I'm sure I'm missing something. Any theories?"
She strangles the urge to yell when there's another shared look, but Merrill's quick to speak. "I would have used dried witherstalk, but dragonthorn works almost as well, and not everyone can get witherstalk — oh, sorry, Hawke."
"It's fine," Hawke says. A muscle ticks in her jaw when she grits her teeth. And she baked it like it was bread, and soon enough it sang, comes her father's voice, worn smooth by the passing years. She shakes off the memory. "I'm really not going to like this, am I?"
Merrill shakes her head. "It's — it sounds like a charm. The Keeper makes ones like it sometimes, if hunters are going far from the aravels in a new place."
"Surana used something like that in the Deep Roads," Anders adds. "Only she used her own hair. So she could find us if we…" He rubs his arms and looks at the fire.
A little silence fills the room, broken only by Bodahn holding a one-sided conversation with Orana and Sandal in the parlor.
Her father didn't call it a charm, did he? It was something else, something older, but the memory falls through her fingers, along with any answers it might hold.
"Shit." Hawke puts her head in her hands. "Maker, I hate this." She can't even be furious, though a fresh burst of the anger she throttled that afternoon would be quite welcome. At least being angry feels like she's doing something, or like she has some control. At this moment, she just feels small and tired. Oh, and very stupid, though that's really business as usual and shouldn't be counted.
"If it even is a charm, they don't have it anymore." So sincere, Anders, so eager to reassure her. His eyes blaze golden in the firelight. "You're safe, Hawke."
She almost shouts at him, but settles for blinking and gaping instead. "I'm not sure safe is a word that applies," she says, measuring each word as carefully as she can. "Especially given the events of the day. Maker, Meredith was just here this morning, wasn't she?"
And yesterday I was vomiting in the streets, and fighting with Fenris, and let's not forget the trip to the Gallows or being stabbed in the hand or the fucking flowers. I'm going to have to start getting up much earlier to fit it all in.
"If they had my hair —" She tries not to think about how Aurelia and her cronies could have gotten hold of it; even the best of the options fills her with dread. "Then why the earrings? They didn't need them, unless it was just to toy with me." She laughs, before dropping her head back into her hands. "It feels a little gratuitous, doesn't it? Or maybe Aurelia's just a fan of overkill. I wonder what else I'm missing. I should —"
She breaks off and stares at the palms of her hands. A little fresh blood stains the bandages wrapped around her left palm, a dark eye on a field of white. Hawke looks away.
"What is it?" Anders leans over the table, and Merrill's half-risen. "Are you all right? Hawke?"
She ignores him, and leans back in her stool. "Sandal? Sandal, could you come here a moment?"
There's a great deal of shuffling, and Nettle whuffs, but eventually Sandal appears in the doorway, his eyes focused past her, on the kitchen windows.
"Do you remember my letter?" Hawke asks. The taste of beef stew congeals at the back of her throat. "The one from my friend Alistair?
A nod.
"Did you move it somewhere?"
Sandal's pale eyes flick to hers before he shakes his head.
"Do you know who did?" She hears Anders and Merrill rustling, but they say nothing. In fact, they melt as far as possible into the background, leaving her to smile encouragingly at the boy with her cold, cold mouth. "Did you see who did it?"
Sandal scuffs his feet. "Don't know where."
"That's all right." Hawke pushes off her stool and holds out her hand to Sandal, still smiling. She might be an idiot to follow this bit of intuition — Maker knows hers hasn't been at its best lately — but she loses nothing by asking. "Did you see someone do it?"
Sandal wipes his nose on the back of his hand. "Very angry."
"I won't be —"
"She was angry. At you."
"Oh, shit," breathes Anders. Merrill hushes him.
Hawke is frozen to the ground. "Sandal," she says. "Did the lady have golden hair?" Did you hear the egg, too?
Nodding, Sandal creeps close. Hawke bends down to let him cup a hand near her ear. "She's too bright now," he stage-whispers. "All wrong. She has it." He pulls away, misery clouding his eyes. "Sorry."
"It's all right." Hawke squeezes his shoulder and offers him another smile, though this one is as weak as they come. "She didn't hurt you, did she?"
Sandal shakes his head as he shrugs off her hand. "Didn't see me," he says. "Didn't look."
Fortunately for Hawke, it doesn't take a genius to guess the letter's contents; its theft provides a neat summation. Alistair somewhere, somehow, got an inkling of this fresh disaster looming over Kirkwall, and tried to warn her. And then Aurelia intervened, leaving Hawke to blame Sandal, never once thinking the disappearance mattered.
Stupid, stupid woman. Hawke bares her teeth at her reflection, with its dark circles and scars and reddened eyes. Everything matters in Kirkwall.
She turns away from the foggy mirror and sits down at her desk. Sleep will be some time coming, if it decides to arrive at all, so she might as well make herself useful. Another night, she might have begged Anders and Merrill to sit up with her, but Merrill's cold resurfaced with the arrival of the evening mist, and Anders went back to the clinic to check on Fern and their patients. If she listens hard enough, she can hear Merrill coughing down the hall, and Bodahn singing Sandal tunelessly to sleep.
If she listens a little harder, she hears the slow drip of water coming from deep within the walls.
Thunder growls out beyond the city, but for now there is no wind, no rain, just the slow clockwork winding-down of the day. Hawke draws a long breath, which feels as though it comes through a wad of wet cotton. The air drags past teeth, over tongue, thick and slow, heavy on the skin. Her hands, when she presses them to the polished top of her desk, leave dark, humid prints behind.
The question now isn't what Alistair was trying to tell her, but how he knew about it at all. As of his last letter — sent nearly three months ago now — he was headed into the Korcari Wilds, along with a handful of new Grey Wardens from Amaranthine. Chasing down rumors of new darkspawn activity, nothing out of the ordinary, if one's ordinary was defined as "hunting down hordes of mindless ravening beasts before they spoil the earth for a few decades". But had he alluded to something else, some other mission that might point Hawke toward how, exactly, he might have known to warn her?
It's a fool's errand, just a way to distract from the growing weight of knowing she failed, again, to make any material difference, but she digs into her drawer of old letters regardless. Repression and self-deprecation have served her well so far. Why give up on them now?
Alistair's last letter is wedged between three pages of manifesto proofs and a sketch Varric made of her one night at the Hanged Man. Hawke stares at the sketch — she's laughing, her hair tumbling past her shoulders, and unscarred — and then her belly lurches, and she balls the sketch up and throws it into the fire.
It takes a few tugs to pull the letter free — something sticky has bled into the drawer, and dried into an awful mass at the bottom — then Alistair's familiar writing glows in the candlelight.
My dear Hawke,
By the time you read these words, I may have died a sad, sordid death deep in the Korcari Wilds, drunk dry by mosquitos the size of my foot. Remember me well, if I pass from life in such ignominious fashion!
Yes, yes, I know, I can hear you rolling your eyes at me. It's not my fault, I've been reading Hard in Hightown because only Oramey thought to bring any books along, and she's a big fan of your Varric Tethras. He's got a rather…notable way of writing, I'll give him that.
Have I told you about Oramey yet? You'd like her. To look at her you'd just see a little scrap of an elf, like someone the wind would blow over, but she's deadly, just deadly. Right in the Surana mold. She took the Joining only a few months ago, but Surana seems pleased with her. Pleased enough to send her on this little sojourn with me, which I, personally, wouldn't count as any kind of favor. On account of the mosquitos. Oh, and the fact that we're hunting darkspawn, and there's a very good chance we might find another witch of the Wilds out here. Just my luck if we do.
We're starting to —
Hawke looks up from the letter as footsteps echo from the far end of the corridor. Her heart kicks a little in her chest, and she can't help thinking that perhaps it's Fenris, at last come home, but within a few seconds she realizes they aren't footsteps at all, but water, falling from a great height.
The sea's voice rolls, heavy enough to make her vision waver, then fades away.
She shivers in the clammy air — she could get up and close her windows, but that seems too great an effort to make now — and then jumps, as a drop of water falls on the page and smears the ink.
As she reaches for a handkerchief to blot the letter, another drop, ice-cold, lands on the back of her hand. More fall on her desk, on the rug behind her, on the canopy hanging over her bed. One drop slips down her collar and between her breasts, leaving a chill trail all the way to her belly.
Hawke shoves the letter back into the drawer and slams it shut. The fire hisses in its grate as water pours down the chimney; the ceiling groans as cracks form in the plaster. Her wallpaper — painted silk, and nearly a century old — bulges under the steady currents, then peels away in languid, tattered strips.
"You don't have to do this," she says, with a calm she certainly doesn't feel. "You're — you're in my bloody head, you don't have to scare me to get your point across. We can talk now, remember?"
The sea, if it remains, doesn't reply. Instead, there's a sharp crack as something splinters overhead and bits of plaster rain down with the water. One piece, the size of her closed fist, strikes her in the shoulder, hard enough to tear the seam of her dress and bruise the skin beneath.
"For fuck's sake!" Too startled to care she's shouting, Hawke whirls around, one hand raised high to protect her head, the other covering her shoulder. "I'm listening! What do you want? I'll get her back, I swear to you, you don't have to —"
HAWKE.
The voice is within the rain, within the breaking of wood and the slow movement of loosened stone. A voice with no need for flesh to shape it, no lungs to give it life. It only speaks her name, but that alone is enough to send her from fear and out to the other side of terror, a hollow airless space with only a high whine to break the silence.
Still the water comes down, and down, her fine house crumbling about her, and one by one the candles go out.
In time, the flood stops. Hawke finds herself crouched on the sodden carpet, surrounded by the smells of mildew and salt. Her feet crunch against glass as she stands, unsteadily, and staggers toward her desk. Along the way, she trips on a bit of wood, only then thinking to conjure a bit of flame into her palm. Her eyes water at the sudden burst of light, and when they clear she sees a half-rotted pile of wood and velvet where her chair used to be.
She stares at the wreckage, unblinking, long enough for her eyes to smart and her lungs to ache. With a shudder, she turns away, inhaling only to choke on the strangely thickened air. Below the mildew and rot hangs another scent, of half-gone meat and heavy spices. Her mouth waters, the old taste of beef mingling with the noxious perfume of the black flowers.
Which are, she realizes, hanging in long tendrils from her ceiling, and creeping in through her windows. They trail from the fireplace, and from the open door to the hallway, and on her bed they've twisted themselves into a dense tangle that throbs, mindlessly, like the beat of a vast heart.
Hawke steps carefully over the broken glass to the empty windowsill — she'd grown roses there, and planned to again, but the windowboxes blister with dark blossoms. This close, she hears the rasp the petals make as they brush together in a faint wind. Her stomach turns, but she makes herself look out to the square, and to Hightown beyond it.
Everywhere, the bruise-black flowers. They teem from cracks in the stone, from each open window and door; no roof is left empty. As she watches, the Selbrechs' estate wall crumbles under the weight of the blooms, strewing rubble and shredded flowers halfway across the square.
No one can live here. No one does live here. Kirkwall is dead, as empty as it is in her worst nightmares, when a laughing voice chases her ever farther from home and the air grows thinner with every breath she takes.
No — no. Not just dead. Eaten. Flowers need food to grow, after all.
"All right," she whispers, stepping back into the dark of her ruined bedroom. "Message received. Care to clarify what it is?"
She waits for the sea to respond, but there's nothing. No roar, no voice at all. Her head is all hers once again, the strange weight at the back of her skull vanished.
Alone at last.
Hawke douses her flame. Stupid to keep it burning at all, when any light is good as a lighthouse beacon. But she's doused it too late, and a flicker of movement draws her back to the window. There — in the Selbrech estate, moving along the second floor, just visible through the broken wall: something moves at speed toward the open air.
toward you oh yes little flame little bright one little sweet one so long the wait so long so long and now a little light has come a very little light indeed to come so far and now the light is here the light is near the light is
the light is
Hawke knows that voice, and that hunger. She knows the teeth snapping at the edge of her awareness. When the shape — fat coils unraveling, an oil-slick sheen and a single mad eye — pours from the wall, she calls her flame back into being, and smiles out the window.
LIGHT
The shape hits the ground the instant before she crushes her burning hand to her own chest, and it screams, mad and thwarted, it screams, as she's thrown back into her dim, dreaming house.
There's nothing quite like fire for pain; it lasts long after the flesh and the nerves within are gone. Hawke retches, facedown on the floor, while her vision goes grey and white by turns. But she doesn't smell the fucking flowers anymore, only the lemon oil Orana uses to clean and her own honey and rose perfume.
She rolls to her back, gasping at her now-unbroken ceiling, and braces herself to peel her hand free. Her fingers stick to each other and to her chest, but her skin is whole beneath her dress, if flushed blood-red and smarting.
Hawke, whispers the sea, once more cradled by her skull.
She groans weakly. "I'm fresh out of terror," she manages, in a cracked voice. "So just tell me — was that my punishment?"
A future. A promise.
"Oh, if I fail, you'll have your flowers eat the city up?"
Not ours.
Hawke cringes under the vicious snap in its voice. "Then — then whose?"
Elsewhere. The narrow passage opens. The sea's voice fades into the usual roar, cresting in the distance. Hurry. There is no more time.
It may say something else, but the voice collapses under its own weight before she makes out the words. Then her head is empty, and she's alone.
She lies on the floor, shivering, long after the voice is gone. The house sighs around her, in peaceful sleep, broken only by the turning of a key in a lock downstairs.
Hawke sits up, aching in every joint, and inches toward the door. A smoke-thin hope curls through her — maybe it's Fenris — but she knows it's far more likely to be Anders, or Isabela, come to raid her kitchen after the night's tryst. Still, she makes her careful way through the dark hall — no light this time, not with her hand still trembling from the force of her spell — and to the top of the landing.
There she freezes, both hands white-knuckled around the bannister, because the person standing before the fire is Fenris, rain-soaked and weary. He turns at her quick breath, mouth parted — but before he can speak she stumbles down the stairs.
Nothing changes when she reaches him; she's still cold, and sore, and weary to her heart. She still hears the noxious voice, feels the heat of its hunger. But when he sighs, and opens his arms to fold her under his cloak, all these things cease to matter. For a little while.