By Gods Forsaken

by inwardtransience

One day, the shadows will part, and the skies will open wide. When he rises, everyone will see. (How do you do a summary for something this big? Total retelling, Mahariel!Warden, mage!Hawke, Dreamer!Trevelyan!Inquisitor, worldbuilding, too many OCs, serious plot edits, primarily F/F.)

23. Kirkwall — II

9:30 Eluveista

Kirkwall, Confederation of Free Cities

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It only took a little while for Marian to begin to think she might have overreacted.

That first night, working out the terms of their arrangement in Athenril's surprisingly ordinary-looking office — not that Marian had ever seen an office before, but nothing jumped out at her as obvious criminal stuff — she'd been on edge the entire time. Waiting for the trap to be sprung, for Athenril to make some entirely unreasonable demand they weren't in a position to refuse, and Marian would have to decide whether to refuse anyway and damn the consequences. They'd been sitting under a brothel with an open criminal, and Bethany had been right there with her, okay, Marian thought she could be forgiven for being a little on edge about it.

But, somewhat to Marian's surprise, Athenril had never once suggested Bethany work here. She had said Bethany could work here or at one of the other brothels they were involved with (Maker, there were more than one), obviously that was an option, but only if Bethany herself volunteered for it, Athenril wasn't going to make her or try to leverage her into it. She'd sounded a little exasperated saying it, actually, telling Marian and Carver to calm the fuck down and try to talk about this like reasonable people.

Weirdly, Bethany herself had seemed unconcerned, and that right there probably should have been Marian's first clue she was worrying too much. Bethany had always been the better judge of character — she seemed to think Athenril was trustworthy, or at least not a threat, and that impression hadn't changed in the time since.

It was rather...unexpected just how fair Athenril was being, so far as the arrangement to repay their debt went. Marian had heard horror stories about debt bondage before, partially from Father growing up and then again and again over the years, gossip filtering through the Bannir person to person. There wasn't any debt bondage in Lothering, or at least very little, enough to go without notice — Lothering had been completely destroyed in the Orlesian invasion, and then again in the Rebellion, all the previous residents fled, there had been enough open land to claim that they'd had very few vagrants compared to much of the rest of the country. Or at least that was what she'd been told, she'd really seen very little of her homeland, she had little idea how things were elsewhere.

Probably the most common form of debt bondage in Ferelden, or at least the kind she'd heard the most about, were tenant farmers. After a period of settlement in a certain place, too many people having too many children, eventually they'd run out of open land, and there would be people who had nowhere to go and no way to support themselves. Some left for the cities to look for work, but others would make deals with local freeholders, agreeing to work their land in exchange for enough of the harvest to live. The freeholder often asked for a buy-in — they probably didn't have somewhere for the tenant to live on their land, so they'd need to build the tenant a new home, the tenant required to cover the expense.

Now, this did seem...sort of fair, on its face. Marian thought the idea that the tenants do all the work but the harvest belongs to the freeholder, just because they own the land, was nugshit, but ignoring that part of it the tenant being expected to contribute to their own home being built on the land, and whatever else went into that, that sort of made sense, didn't it? Of course, the obvious problem there was that a vagrant wasn't likely to have the resources, in materials or coin, to have a home built, so the freeholder covered it themselves, the tenant expected to pay them back.

And there was where the problems came in. See, the freeholder 'owns' the harvest, a portion of it given to the tenants in exchange for their work — so how, exactly, were the tenants supposed to repay them in the first place? The portion of the harvest going to the freeholder didn't count against the debt, since that was 'theirs' to begin with. The tenant could take less than they were usually given one year, or sell what they didn't use if they had extra, and put that to the debt, but there probably wasn't much of a margin there to work with, they'd only be shaving off little slivers at a time.

Also, the cost of other things they needed but hadn't the coin to acquire themselves was often added to the debt. Say, fabric for clothing, or charcoal, sometimes tenants were even expected to provide their own hoes and sickles and the like, the debt added to in bits and pieces season to season.

And then, on top of all that, sometimes the debt also accumulated interest — basically, there was no way to pay it back. Ever.

And there was hardly any way to get out of it either. These sort of agreements were legal in Ferelden, so the magistrates were likely to always side with the freeholder, unless they happened to be doing something especially cruel aside from the debt itself. The tenant could flee, theoretically, but then the freeholder could get the local magistrate to put out a warrant for them. It wasn't guaranteed the tenant would be found, but if they were, the best case scenario would be getting dragged back to the freeholder. If the magistrate decides they're trying to evade responsibility for their debts, say by fleeing the country, the tenant might face trial, which means being held until the court can meet — and jails were horrible cesspools of plague, so they might die before then — and if they're found guilty (which they almost certainly would be) the punishment could be severe, at the worst they could lose a hand — which, if that doesn't kill them by itself, they might not be able to work any longer so will almost certainly starve to death.

And, if the tenant couldn't pay their debt, after their death it passed to their children — supposedly, there were places in Ferelden where people were working against a debt passed down to them from their parents, who'd inherited it from their parents, who'd inherited it from theirs...

It was slavery, basically. Like the serfs of Orlais, there were justifications people had come up with to try to make it sound like that wasn't what was going on, but there was really very little practical difference between a tenant, a serf, and a slave. As far as Marian was concerned, they were the same thing.

So Marian had been understandably wary about their arrangement with Athenril — if they'd had any other practical course of action available to them, she wouldn't have even considered it.

But, weirdly, their negotiation with Athenril hadn't gone anything like the horror stories Marian had heard. Athenril had explained that for every job her people do, the syndicate — referring to her organisation Athenril always said the syndicate or us, never I — takes a cut, the rest divided between the people involved in the job — their fraction of the syndicate's cut would count against their debt.

And that was it. No tricks, no needing to cut into their own pay — and they would still be paid, like everyone else — their contribution to the syndicate was subtracted from their debt, simple as that. Athenril had added ten per cent to the sum they'd bribed the Templars with, arguing that a lot of money at once was worth more than little bits of money over a period of time (which Marian guessed was fair), but aside from that no further interest would be added to the debt. That was it.

When Athenril had explained this, Marian had been extremely skeptical. That just seemed...too good to be true. There had to be a trick to it, somewhere, Marian just hadn't seen it.

Not that she was sure even now where the trick was supposed to be.

After they'd been finished talking about the deal, they'd been handed off to one of Athenril's people — a human boy of maybe twelve, Marian hadn't seen him since — who'd led them off back through zigzagging underground tunnels, eventually coming out into the open street somewhere in the middle of the city. After a little bit of wandering around they'd been led into a large, blocky building — probably the largest she'd ever been in, five storeys high and dozens of feet long, a footprint a bit larger than the village Chantry and significantly taller. On the way in, Marian had noted a symbol carved to the side of the door, a flower inside a ring of thorns, that obviously meant something.

The boy had said this was one of their "door-twars", but Marian had no idea what that word meant. Mother said it was Orlesian — the way she said dortoir made its Orlesian-ness far more obvious, the boy had just sheepishly admitted his Orlesian was terrible — but she couldn't really translate it, apparently there wasn't a good Alamarri equivalent. A lodge-house, basically, like in the old stories from way back before the Unification, multiple families sharing common space.

Mother had babbled on a little bit about how the dortoirs in Kirkwall were descended from the old Tevinter insulae, a concept Marian was vaguely familiar with from Father's history books — some of them actually were original insulae, structures built to house the slaves of the city over a thousand years ago still standing — but the word itself was the same one used for the rooms Mothers and Sisters and Brothers lived in, in Chantries and monasteries, which were actually a completely different thing — it was the word the occupying Orlesians had used, despite not being quite accurate, and the term had stuck since. Marian had gotten the feeling Mother was nervous, rambling on like that.

Anyway, the boy had told one of the people in the entryway that they had a new family moving in, it took a couple minutes to find a spot for them and shuffle people around to make space. The building was divided into cloîtres — which, like dortoir, was another monastic term, though Mother muttered that they were using it wrong — six on each floor. Weirdly, each of the cloître were numbered, which she would later learn was a relic of the Orlesian occupation. In the middle of each cloître was an aître, a common room shared by the people living there, connected to each cloître four box — not the Alamarri word, it was Orlesian again (apparently Orlesian for "box" was actually boîte, which was unnecessarily confusing) — each box housing a single person, couple, or small family.

The boy passed them off to an elven woman, dark-haired and bronze-skinned, maybe about thirty, named Huziru, which was odd-sounding but okay. (Mother gave her a double-take at the name, but didn't say anything.) She explained she ran this dortoir, made sure everything was running the way it should and everyone was getting along and had everything they needed — her face was unmarked, but Marian noticed the same black tattoo of a thorny vine Athenril's people had was wrapped around this woman's wrist instead, which probably meant she was also a member of this syndicate thing. Huziru wrote their names down in a book, along with the number of the cloître they'd been assigned to, and led them upstairs.

When they got there, the cloître wasn't empty — there were a couple men and a woman sitting at chairs inside chatting in whispers, one of the men gently rocking a tiny child against his chest, all elves. (Marian had noticed Athenril's people seemed to be mostly elves.) Names went around quick: the woman was Alya, her husband was Gerael — after Garahel of Ansburg, the Hero of the Fourth Blight, variations on the name were absurdly common among elves in the Marches — and Levin was Gerael's cousin. (They didn't offer the infant's name, and none of the Hawkes asked, there were superstitions about that floating around.) After a short talk, basically just introducing themselves, they were pointed to one of the doors, their room.

It was pretty small, the single lamp hanging in a corner enough to illuminate the whole space easily, but it wasn't filthy or uncomfortable-looking or anything. There were two beds, a single wardrobe, and that was pretty much it — a little cramped, but Marian guessed that was what the common room was for. It looked relatively pleasant, in fact, everything clean (if old and a little worn), curving lines painted on the walls seemingly at random to break up the plain stone with some color. The style looked vaguely elven to Marian, but she wasn't exactly an expert.

Huziru had explained this room was theirs for as long as they wanted it (and continued to work for Athenril, she assumed). They could move around if they liked, but if they were going to move to a different cloître she would like them to tell her, so she could keep everybody straight. Though, if they were to visit one of the other residents overnight (said with a lilt to her voice that made the suggestion obvious), even if it were for weeks at a time, they didn't need to tell her about that, so long as someone in their family was still using this room it would be theirs. The linens had just been changed, the latrines were in the courtyard, downstairs and out back, ask anyone for directions if they get lost, if they need anything go ahead and aks Huziru or one of her helpers. Unless they had any questions, that was it.

Carver had asked, rather bluntly, how much this was going to cost them, how much was going to end up being piled on to their debt just sleeping under Athenril's roof. Huziru had smiled warmly at him, and said none. The syndicate provided all their members a place to live if they didn't have one — that was, in fact, part of what the cut they took from every job was for. There were a number of people living here who'd joined them for that very reason.

Marian had no idea how to react to that — this was not much like what she'd been told about how debt bondage worked. By Carver's dumbfounded silence, she was guessing he felt the same.

That night Marian had slept like the dead, exhausted from too many sleepless nights. In the morning, not long after sunrise, a little elf girl — Marian hadn't known enough elves to guess her age reliably, but she was maybe ten — had met them in the common room. Grinning and cheerfully chattering, the girl handed them soft leather wristbands, along their length thorny vines, by the look of it scorched into them with red-hot wire. The girl had explained these were to let other people know they were one of them — they didn't have to wear them all the time, but if they wanted to go into places run by the syndicate or get things they needed they were handy. (The girl had giggled, amused with her own pun.) She had one of her own, but it was made of cloth and decorated with rough-carved beads, clearly made for her by a family member. Try not to lose the things, very important.

The girl had led them downstairs, where they'd found a group of children led by a few women, who'd confirmed the Hawkes were the new family who'd just moved in before setting off. Back outside down one street, around a corner, down another street, some more corners... Yeah, Marian was lost already. The walk wasn't very long, but the city was enormous, and everything was completely unfamiliar...

A short walk later and they'd been entering another building, rather smaller than the dortoir, a thin trail of smoke curling into the air out of one corner — Marian again spotted the same rose-and-thorns symbol next to the door. Inside was one wide room, split up here and there with columns, the air flavored with smoke and steam, rows of tables filling the space, crowded with dozens and dozens of people. The noise of so many people crammed in one space was dizzying, Marian had needed a moment after stepping inside to shake it off.

One of the women with their group had explained this was the refectory in this arrondisse, anyone in the syndicate could come here to get food whenever they needed. There were always people staffing the kitchens here, though how many they had varied quite a lot over the day, and they might have to wait if they wanted hot food at odd times. Come over here or one of the syndicate's other places whenever and they'd be fed, that was the whole point.

Apparently, they didn't have to pay for this either — everyone who worked for the syndicate was provided food to eat and a place to sleep. Which was...unexpected. Marian still didn't know what to think about this, it wasn't at all what she'd pictured when she'd imagined a criminal organization.

(Though she was starting to get the feeling Gamlen had known what he was doing when he went to Athenril's people first.)

They'd been in the refectory for maybe an hour, eating and chatting with a few friendly neighbors, when a man had come looking for them, randomly wandering around and yelling for Hawke. He'd collected them and they'd left again, and their education had begun.

Because, of course, before they could really do much of anything for the syndicate at all, there were quite a few things they needed to learn. The man, a warm and friendly human named Gervasio (Antivan? or Nevarran?) — he said most people called him "Harry" — had spent most of that first day talking to them about just what this syndicate thing was, how it worked, and what they did in the city. It turned out, all that was far more complicated than Marian had been assuming.

To try to get this all to make sense, Harry began by explaining how the syndicate had started in the first place. For much of its history until about a decade ago, the Blooming Rose — apparently, that was the name of the brothel they'd been taken through last night — had been owned by one of the city's noble families, but they hadn't managed it themselves, ever since the end of the Qunari occupation delegating it to contacts in the Coterie instead. Of course, the only one of the Hawkes who had any idea what the Coterie was was Mother — Harry briefly explained they were once a guild of thieves, but in the last century or so had quickly expanded to become one of the largest criminal groups in the city, involved in pretty much everything in one way or another.

For a long while, this more or less worked just fine, but eventually the boss managing the Blooming Rose had gotten greedy, started cutting corners on whatever he could get away with and pocketing the difference for himself, pressing whores into permanent debt bondage. The boss who took over after him, a man named Harlan, had taken it even further. It was under him that the practice of buying children off of their parents and forcing them into prostitution started — basically slavery, the whores' captivity enforced by the Coterie's thugs.

Eventually, the workers at the Blooming Rose — whores and cooks and maids, their friends and family, even a few defectors from the Coterie — had had enough. They'd rebelled against Harlan, attacking him and a few of his lieutenants during a visit, the brothel breaking out into a messy battle between the workers and Harlan's thugs. In the end, the whores had won. Athenril and a couple of her friends, the leaders of the rebellion, had gone to the nobleman who owned the brothel and demanded he hand ownership of it over to them, or else they would march straight over to the Cathedral and tell the Grand Cleric that he'd been assisting and profiting off of sexual slavery. Supposedly, the threat had terrified the piss out of the man, and he'd signed the property over to Athenril's people without protest.

The rebels had put together their own little self-government, kind of like a village council in miniature, and the group that would eventually become today's "Blackthorn Co-operative and Popular Defence League" had been born. They did have some problems right away. As part of his efforts to cut costs, their Coterie boss had been supplying the brothel through his own smuggling operations, and now that they were actually paying everyone properly money would get tight quickly.

So Athenril had gotten together all their people she could find worth a damn in a fight, and started taking over those smuggling operations bit by bit. Progress had been slow, at first — especially since they were being careful not to annoy the Carta, dwarven smugglers centered on Orzammar, probably the single biggest criminal group in the city — but they got help before too long. Some of the workers at the brothel had known people in other brothels who were in situations just as bad as the Blooming Rose's had been, and the syndicate had started helping to organize revolts in brothels across the city, slowly taking them over one by one. Also, as the syndicate grew, Coterie members started just defecting to the Blackthorns entirely — syndicates, as a rule, tended to pay and treat their people better than groups like the Coterie, so. After about a year they'd spread enough they weren't in any danger of running out of anything, unless something disastrous happened.

It was around then that they'd gotten into a street war with the Coterie — or factions of the Coterie, apparently they weren't a single organization but an alliance of a whole bunch of littler ones, it sounded confusing. They had lost a few people, but it'd ended up being a massive victory for the Blackthorns. Everything those Coterie groups had been involved in — a couple more brothels, a bunch of stores and stuff, even several entire dortoir — had passed to the syndicate. They reorganized all the businesses and stuff into the self-run things that apparently make a syndicate a syndicate, and they'd been slowly expanding ever since, absorbing smaller syndicates, picking away Coterie operations, even plain buying out businesses and properties to make them their own.

At this point, the Blackthorns were hardly the largest group in the city, but they weren't small anymore either. They had hundreds of members, including families and associates well into the thousands — Harry didn't know precisely, he didn't have much to do with the books himself. Which was fucking absurd, when Marian thought about it. Just the dortoir they'd been put up in could easily house as many people as Lothering proper, and everyone living there were associated with the Blackthorns in some way, and there were other buildings dotted around the city just like it! It was, just, ridiculous, Marian hadn't imagined anything like this...

Once the history was over, Marian's head spinning from the scale of what they'd blundered into, Harry had started explaining how the syndicate was organized — which turned out to be rather complicated, actually. A place of work, like a brothel or a weaver's house or a carpentry workshop or a store or whatever, could be a member of the syndicate; they could only become a member if the people who worked there ran the place themselves, had voted to join the syndicate. Each of the members would pick from among themselves a few speakers, who met twice a month for something called the congress, where they made decisions about what they should do with the syndicate's common resources, where and how they were going to get things they needed, if and how they should expand, all kinds of things.

All that mostly wasn't important for Marian and Carver — they weren't working for one of the members, but the "Popular Defence League" part of the operation. The way Marian thought about it was, if the syndicate were thought of as a little kingdom, this was the army. They worked as guards, protecting the different members — that was what the armed men Marian had noticed in the entryway to the brothel were for — escorted smugglers through the city, to make sure no one tried to attack them on their way; and dealt with the smaller street gangs near their members, on occasion fighting directly against one of the big criminal groups in the city (usually the Coterie, sometime slavers). They'd also hire their protection out to people outside of the group now and again to make some extra coin — mostly legitimate businesses and sometimes even noblemen, but occasionally another syndicate (but only syndicates, never any other kind of criminal group). Apparently the dwarven Merchants' Guild was their biggest customer for that kind of thing, which Mother thought was hilarious for some reason.

There were a couple other things they were involved in — particularly theft, and breaking out slaves when they could pin down where some were being held — but Harry said it was most likely they'd mostly be working as guards. Which wasn't so bad, Marian thought? She still wasn't sure how she felt about the syndicate itself, but if she understood correctly the job would basically just be protecting people who'd literally asked the syndicate for the help, so that sounded perfectly fine, really.

There had been more things Harry had had to teach them, mostly things like what the tattoos and symbols meant, where they could go if they needed help and under what circumstances they were obligated to help people who asked for it, so forth and so on. All told, they'd ended up spending much of the day with him, there'd been a lot to go over.

After that, Marian and Carver at the very least had to learn how to get around the city without getting hopelessly lost. That was, unfortunately, far more difficult than it sounded.

With the exception of their stay in Amaranthine, which didn't really count, Marian had never been in a city before. (Also crossing through Gwaren, but that was a small city, comparatively.) Just from a distance, Denerim had looked absolutely enormous — nobody knew for certain, since a proper count had never been done, but it was thought Denerim was home to somewhere between sixty and ninety thousand people. Considering the entire Bannir of Lothering had maybe only a few thousand people in it, that still seemed kind of ridiculous to Marian. She hadn't really believed it, back when all she knew about Denerim was what she'd read in books or heard from people who'd visited, but looking on the city from the sea, yeah, she guessed that was maybe possible. The largest city in Ferelden wasn't Denerim, but Highever, which supposedly had upwards of a hundred twenty thousand people in it, which was just insane. It was spread over a larger area, of course, but still.

Just from the lights Marian had seen from the water that night, how long it'd taken to walk up from the shore to the Rose, she guessed Kirkwall must be bigger than Denerim. And she wasn't wrong about that, Kirkwall was the third largest city in all of the Free Marches, behind only Cumberland and Starkhaven — the second largest if Nevarra wasn't included in the Marches, which Marchers usually didn't — making it one of the largest cities in all the south. From the surveys of the population the Orlesians had done during their occupation of the city, assuming it hadn't changed much, including the main city and all the underground areas and the towns around the fortresses on the sea cliffs, Kirkwall had a population of nearly half a million.

Half a million.

Kirkwall had a population equal to a quarter of the entire Kingdom of Ferelden.

That was just absurd. Marian simply couldn't wrap her head around that many people living in one place, it was unimaginable.

Not only was Kirkwall bloody enormous, it was also extremely weird and complicated. The city proper was along the side of the cliffs at one end of the enclosed harbor, basically carved into the cliffside, but it didn't rise up smoothly. Instead, the old Tevinters had build the city to descend in steps, like a giant staircase, lengths of flattened ground separated by vertical rises of eight to twelve feet. There were multiple ways to get from level to level — staircases spread out at regular intervals, buildings against the inside of the step often had exits onto the next level on the second or third floor, some had tunnels carved into the cliffside leading up — so it wasn't really difficult to move around. The problem was how tall and tightly-packed the buildings were, restricting lines of sight to practically nothing, even if the buildings weren't in the way the steps were tall enough it was impossible to make out much of anything even one level up. The Keep and the Cathedral could be seen from any of the steps, but those were about the only consistent landmarks...and of course that didn't so shit for the underground areas.

Also, did she mention the place was fucking huge? Because the place was fucking huge, she thought that was important to keep in mind.

Needless to say, finding her way around the place was going to take some getting used to.

Their second afternoon in the city, Gerael led the twins and Marian to one of the "Popular Defence League"'s storehouses, and pulled out a map. With it all drawn out like this, it was more obvious that the city wasn't spread out across the cliffs evenly, wide at the water level and narrowing as it rose, and then bulging out again in the middle before narrowing toward the Keep at the top — she remembered the lights in the night had kind of given her that impression.

The city, Gerael explained, was split up into arrondisses, which themselves were split into cantons. Numbers for arrondisses and cantons were carved into the ground at each street-corner, so knowing how they were arranged, where each one was in the city and which one important places were in, made it much easier to get around. They might still get lost, but if they payed attention to arrondisse and canton they could at least find their way back home without too much trouble.

The entirety of the smallest step in the city, at the very top, made up the first arrondisse, which was actually the largest of them by area. At the core of the first arrondisse was a place called the Lower Court, a big garden/courtyard thing surrounded by the mansions of noble families — that was the first canton. There were more homes for nobles and rich people, plus some luxury stores and things, making up the second, third, and fourth cantons. To the east, on the other side of the third canton, was the fifth canton — the Chantry Yard, around a stone courtyard homes and offices for Mothers and Clerics and Sisters, and the various lay people working in the area, and also the Cathedral itself. (Marian noticed the look Bethany had been giving the rectangles marking the place on the map, she made a mental note to bring her there sometime.) To the south of the Lower Court, past the fourth canton, were the sixth and seventh cantons, which, besides a couple housing blocks and shops, were mostly filled with a huge open market, though the goods sold there were rather too fine for common people. To the west of there was the eighth canton, consisting entirely of Orzammar's embassy and the dwarven Merchants' Guild. To the north of that was the ninth canton, often called Shutter Row, which was the only canton in the first arrondisse it was legal to operate a brothel in — pretty much everything on the entire street was either a brothel, including the Blooming Rose, or housing for people who worked in the brothels, some of these under the protection of the syndicate. There were more cantons in the first arrondisse, a total of fourteen, but they didn't need to worry about the rest, they'd hardly ever go there.

They might have noticed the first arrondisse had pretty much everything people needed in their daily lives — there were plenty of homes, a public bath, stores in addition to a big open market, a Chantry, institutions relevant to the people living there (which in this case were predominantly the dwarven things, the Cathedral, and the Keep, which wasn't part of the first arrondisse but was adjacent to it). Gerael had claimed every arrondisse was like that, or had been designed with the intention of making it so. Every single arrondisse in the city had its own Chantry, its own open market, and its own public bath. The cantons in an arrondisse had rules about what kind of commerce was allowed there — for example, people could set up stalls or whatever in market cantons but not anywhere else, different trades or industries were often restricted to certain cantons, sometimes cantons were entirely residential and no commerce was allowed, that kind of thing. Sometimes it was clear just looking around what the rules were in a particular canton, sometimes not, it depended.

The most obvious case was prostitution: cantons where it was allowed were required to hang green lanterns on street corners, brothels themselves decorated with green curtains and the like. All the green Marian had noted on Shutter Row was actually mandated by the Kingdom, which was odd, but okay.

Except, argh, Kirkwall wasn't a kingdom, there was no king, it was a...republic? Marian wasn't certain what the proper term was...

Anyway, the basic idea going into it was that people living in each arrondisse could go about their daily life without needing to leave for anything — there was everything they needed right there, like smaller towns all stuck together to make the city. (Each of the little towns still much larger than Lothering, of course.) This was something Orlais had made so during their occupation, the system of arrondisses and cantons forcing a more ordered structure on the city, one of their primary motivations in doing so directly connected to why all the buildings, and individual dwellings in multi-family homes, were also numbered. It turned out, the whole system was an indirect consequence of the Qunari Wars.

Kirkwall had been occupied from 45 Steel to 12 Storm, about seventy years, and again from 58 Storm to 84 Storm, for a total of about a century. The Orlesians continued to hold Kirkwall after liberating it for another few decades, and this time they'd learned from their previous mistake: the Qunari conquest of Kirkwall in the Steel Age had been a hard-fought campaign, but in the Storm Age Kirkwall had fallen almost overnight, converts inside the city sabotaging their defenses and letting the invaders into the city. Learning from similar efforts in other lands, particularly Antiva and Tevinter, Orlais embarked on a systematic campaign to bring every single inhabitant of the city back to the Chant.

One of the more difficult problems they had to deal with was people moving around — it was hard to be sure they'd gotten to everyone if they didn't stay put. So, they'd divided the city into these arrondisse things, making sure each had within them everything the residents needed to survive, and then walled them off and posted guards at the gates. All the residences were surveyed and numbered, including the divisions inside the larger buildings. And the Mothers and Templars working on the project crawled through the city building by building, either confirming the residents already sang the Chant or else converting them away from the Qun. Once the Qun was eliminated from an arrondisse, the barriers around it and the guards would be removed, people allowed to move about freely again, but it was a slow process — it technically hadn't even been over when the occupation ended, it continued for a few decades after independence before the Chantry finally declared Kirkwall was entirely free of the Qun.

But, according to Gerael, they hadn't done quite as good a job as they'd thought. For one thing, just because a person said all the right things when the Mothers were around didn't mean they really believed it — there had been people who'd played along and then went right back to the Qun when the Chantry wasn't watching.

And there was the problem of Darktown. All the underground passages and chambers, some of which Marian had seen on the way up to the city proper, had been lumped together in a twenty-seventh arrondisse, but this wasn't like the other ones. The Orlesians didn't even have a map of everything under the surface — they were the remains of old Tevinter mining tunnels, expanded over the centuries since, nobody really knew what all was down there — so it was impossible for them to organize the whole thing, to keep people from moving around long enough to convert them out of the Qun.

There were Andrastian Brousies (what Darktown residents called themselves), even a couple humble little Chantries dotted here and there...but a lot of these weren't even official Chantries, not part of the higher organization they had that Marian honestly knew very little about. They'd basically been started by rogue Mothers who'd gone off to administer to the poor on their own — they were Chantries, yes, but also orphanages and kitchens and shelters. The Mothers there were usually ordained (though there without approval from the diocese, sort of like deserters, if that made sense), but the Sisters often weren't really Sisters, in the sense that they hadn't been confirmed by Chantry officials, it was sort of complicated.

The Mothers preaching in Darktown also tended to be rather...fiery, but Gerael said that was actually really common in poorer neighborhoods — Marian would have to take his word on that one, this sort of thing was entirely new to her.

The point was, Gerael said there were still Qunari converts in Kirkwall, generations after the liberation. There were even scattered communities throughout the city, especially in Darktown, that spoke Qunari as their primary language — most of them also spoke Alamarri (or Brouse, the Darktown dialect), but among themselves they still spoke Qunari. Marian and the twins were both a little shocked by that news. She'd always thought there were no Qunari in the south anymore, she'd never met a Qunari before, she'd never met anyone who'd met one, it was just...unthinkable, really.

Smirking, Gerael had claimed the three of them had definitely met at least one Qunari before. Huziru, the manager of their dortoir, was Qunari. She'd been born into it, her parents were Qunari and had raised her Qunari — that's why her name sounded odd, it was in Qunari. Marian hadn't known what to say to that, and by their own dumbfounded stares the twins hadn't either. She'd had no idea...

That evening, when she'd caught sight of Huziru back home, she hadn't been able to help staring at her, watching for...she didn't know, really. It was just a weird fucking thought, was all.

(She seemed perfectly normal, honestly, which made Marian feel vaguely uncomfortable for some reason she couldn't put words to.)

Over the next week or so, Athenril's people had taken turns teaching Marian and Carver to find their way through the city. They'd go out on their own, Marian going with one guide and Carver with another, and they'd be led on a confusing, switch-backing route into the city, sometimes taking detours through Darktown, intentionally trying to get the Hawkes lost. Once they thought they'd gone far enough, Marian's guide would turn to her and tell her to find her way back home, or to a refectory or League post, or even the Blooming Rose, or other places like a particular market or the Cathedral or a specific pier at the docks, all kinds of places. And once Marian found the place — or gave up, too thoroughly lost to figure it out — her guide would lead her off again and give her another destination, over and over.

As completely alien as her surroundings were, as fucking enormous as the city was, as much as the tall, tightly-packed buildings cut off any possible landmarks, it wasn't actually that difficult to figure out. On each of the steps was an avenue running parallel to the cliff — it didn't run through each arrondisse but each did have wide roads leading to the avenue, and she could always ask a local which way the avenue was. She could always follow the avenue to the Long Stairs, an absurdly wide staircase with a peculiar flat ramp in the middle that ran all the way from the docks to the step just under the first arrondisse, so she could follow that to whatever step she needed to get to. The wide street connecting the Long Stairs had signs on every step carved into the paving tiles where it met the avenues, indicating which way the arrondisses on this step were. The cantons were arrayed kind of randomly, but there were plaques at each street corner with the numbers of the arrondisse and canton, so if she just wandered randomly inside an arrondisse she'd find the canton she wanted eventually, and inside each canton the buildings were numbered too, so she just had to find the right number.

It was hardly an efficient system, it involved a lot of random wandering around, but it wasn't complicated. With enough time she could find her way anywhere, so long as she knew which arrondisse and canton it was in. After a couple days of wandering through the city, Marian took a couple coins from their stash and went down to the market in the thirteenth arrondisse — part of "lowtown", the bulge halfway up the cliffs Marian had first noticed from the water, though lowtown proper was usually considered to be the eight, ninth, and tenth arrondisses right along the Long Stairs in the center, which were rather more high-class than the rest of it — where she bought a little notebook. (Paper was rather cheaper here than in Lothering, for some reason.) She started noting down the arrondisse, canton, and number of everywhere she went, or at least anything that seemed important, so she wouldn't forget where it all was. Just those three numbers weren't as useful as a proper map, obviously, but knowing that much was enough to find her way around, given enough time.

After over a week in the city, someone decided they were ready, and they began to be put to work — and not just Marian and Carver, Bethany and Mother ended up helping out too. Marian and Carver had been actually working for maybe only a couple days before Bethany, apparently feeling guilty for not contributing, had volunteered to help out at the refectory near their dortoir. The people working there did get paid — about a shilling a week, which sounded like a lot to Marian, but in Kirkwall it really wasn't — but since the syndicate didn't make any money off of it that didn't count against their debt. Bethany was saving up most of it, presumably so she could give it to Athenril's people to shave off bits of their debt, but Marian would rather she just didn't bother — it didn't work out to that much anyway, she might as well spend it on other things.

At first Mother hadn't had much to do, sitting around at their dortoir. Since she was actually from Kirkwall, she hadn't needed the lessons on how to get around — she was often out, visiting Gamlen at his home in lowtown's eleventh arrondisse. (Not a very nice neighborhood, rather crowded and dingy, quite a low fall for a former count.) One day, seemingly bored, she'd wandered into the little courtyard behind the dortoir and stumbled into one of the childrens' lessons — on top of everything else, the syndicate taught their people's children how to read, among other things (apparently there were just too many people here for the Chantry to handle it as they did in Lothering) — one thing had led to another, and Mother had ended up giving the children an impromptu Orlesian lesson.

When the women running the dortoir (also responsible for teaching the children) had learned Mother was fluent in Orlesian — raised with it as a second native language, if slightly rusty after a couple decades in Ferelden — word had been passed up the chain, and one evening Athenril herself had turned up to talk to her about it. Apparently, the nobility and a broad swath of tradesmen and merchants in Kirkwall spoke Orlesian, so knowing the language gave a person access to better-paying work in nicer parts of the city. Mother was hired to help teach the syndicate's people (children, yes, but also adults), which paid rather well, Mother actually brought home more coin than Marian and Carver did — though, like Bethany, the syndicate didn't make anything from it, so it didn't count against the debt.

Marian had taken to sitting In on Mother's lessons when she wasn't busy with something else. She did know a tiny bit of Orlesian, picked up from random things Mother had said over the years, but definitely not enough to hold a conversation. Unlike back home, here it actually did some good to be able to speak the language — Fereldans tended to be suspicious of Orlesian-speakers, in fact, for the obvious reason — so it just seemed like the thing to do.

Marian and Carver, though, were working for the League. And that was a whole different thing.

The first thing Marian was called to do was guard a weavers' house. She and three armed men — including Levin, one of the men in their cloître — crossed lowtown to a slightly run-down-looking shop space. (They were in the fourteenth arrondisse, which was one of the poorer ones ringing lowtown, filth lingering on the streets and roughly-built shacks leaning against walls in places.) The inside was clean and orderly, though. They were met inside by a few people (from the family living on the second floor, she assumed), and were joined a few minutes later by a couple dozen trickling through the door. They were mostly women and girls, though Marian noticed a few were men — all elves, interestingly, but she guessed elves did have smaller hands than humans, so the fine work was probably easier.

The workers actually brought supplies with them, carried in packs and a laden wheelbarrow. Marian was told this particular arrondisse was having gang trouble at the moment, which was why the League's people were here to begin with — apparently they were worried if they left small, easily-moveable things here overnight they'd be stolen. Spinning wheels and looms were rather harder to run off with. After a brief discussion, the group split up, some spinning and others weaving, a few gathering on a circle of cushions on the floor, working together to embroider finished fabric in sections. Soon the space was filled with the wooden clacking of the looms and spinning wheels, the weavers gossiping as they worked, laughing now and then at a joke.

The job was rather boring, actually. Their group of four guards were split in half — two lingered near the door, near enough to chat with the embroiderers, and two more went up onto the roof to keep an eye on the streets around. Marian was tapped for the latter spot. Getting up there required going up a narrow, rickety set of stairs in the back, then up a ladder and out a little hatch. There was a table and a few benches up here, covered with a couple shades made out of tar-thickened straw — Marian guessed the people who lived on the second floor spent some time up here — she and Levin took benches at opposite ends of the roof, Marian watching the street and Levin the little courtyard in back. And they waited.

The buildings in this area of the city were relatively low to the ground, harsh blocky shapes made in the same off-white stone as so many other things. Despite how short they were compared to many other arrondisses, how closely-packed they were and how the streets curved meant Marian couldn't actually see very much — the street a short walk to the left, where it ran into the main avenue, curving off to the right after a little further, the buildings across the street, the roofs of the row just behind them. The buildings along the avenue were taller, blocking off anything past them, not so far beyond that curve off in the other direction was the face of the next step, the buildings overhead (facing away from the street up there, plain and undecorated) blocking off anything past them, even straight ahead her angle was so shallow she couldn't see much, just a couple roofs, even those eventually blotted out by taller buildings. From here, Marian could make out the the greening points of a bronze sunburst, the local Chantry, over there a low, wide structure she knew must be the baths. Other than that, plain, stark stone boxes, and that was pretty much it.

There weren't even many people around. People were supposed to be able to get by without needing to leave their arrondisse, but that wasn't really true anymore. Besides a few collections of craftsmen, like this weavers' house here, it looked like most had to go elsewhere to work — there had been plenty of people on the streets earlier in the morning, but now they'd emptied almost entirely. There were still some around, but they were mostly not of an age to work, mostly young children kicking around trailed by the occasional minder. On this street, late in the morning a sizeable group of children were playing some kind of game, passing a ball back and forth, running around and shouting and laughing.

At one point, some of the children spotted her, waving and calling up to her. Bemused, Marian waved back, and then they were off again.

There was a break at some point in the middle of the day, the weavers filing out the door and then walking off down the street as a group. Marian hadn't been warned, but the guards were actually supposed to stay behind — after all, their work might be stolen while they were away. They returned after a little while, and filed right back in. A couple minutes later, one of the women came up the hatch, passing the two of them bread and cheese and fresh wineskins. (It wasn't a particularly warm or sunny day, but they had been up here for a while.) After chatting for a little bit, making sure she and Levin were okay up here, she went back inside, and their watch continued.

The afternoon felt like it went on far too long. It was dreadfully boring, but Marian guessed that was actually a good thing — if it got not boring, it would probably be because she was fighting thieves or gangsters. Between killing people and boredom, she'd take boredom.

When evening fell, the sun dipping behind the cliffs throwing the city into shadow — there was still an hour or two before sunset, Kirkwall had a weirdly extended twilight — they were finally done. The weavers split into two, one group carrying bobbins and fabric and unspun flax, the other bundles of cloth embroidered and ready for sale. (Marian couldn't make out the designs folded up, but she could tell the work was far finer than she'd ever bothered doing with her own clothes.) Both groups were escorted by two guards, Marian went with the ones with the unfinished materials. After crossing the avenue and turning down a few streets, these were dropped off in a storehouse one arrondisse over — Marian noticed the now familiar rose-and-thorns design carved next to the door, armed men with the kinked tattoos on their faces gathered at a table in the entryway playing cards.

And then the group split up, the weavers heading home and Marian and Levin back to the League post they'd started at this morning. They were each handed a few coins, but Marian handed them straight back, telling them to put it against her debt. She still had silver saved up from Lothering, and the syndicate were housing and feeding them, and Mother (and later Bethany) was making money too — between all that, they didn't really need this right now.

Marian and Levin guarded that same weavers' house for about a week, each day as uneventful as the first. A few times Marian noticed shifty-looking figures moving around, but they only came anywhere near once — they turned right around as soon as they noticed the guard on the roof. This was the easiest work she'd ever done in her life, she hardly even had to do anything, it was honestly astounding she was being paid for this...

After that first week or so, she was rotated off to smuggling. This wasn't particularly difficult — and even took much less of her time while paying about the same — but it was rather tedious. The elevators were occupied by legitimate businesses during the day, so if people wanted to move things around it mostly had to be done during the night. Knowing she'd likely be up until dawn, Marian tried to steal a nap that first afternoon, but it didn't really work very well. She went with Gerael to the local League post to meet up with a few more people, then took a long walk through Darktown toward the dockyards.

This job ended up being rather boring too — though, again, she'd rather it be boring than have to fight off Coterie thieves. They met their smugglers in a back street a short walk away from the docks, already waiting with a couple wagons loaded with crates. There was a brief exchange between their two groups, confirming each other were who they were supposed to be (the people up at the League post had given them passwords), and then they were off, the smugglers pushing the wagons through a nearby entrance into the mines.

Since they were moving the things by hand, and the ground in the Darktown passages wasn't exactly even, they moved much more slowly up than the guards had coming down. The other guards tensed up somewhat when they passed through the more open areas underground, like little villages cut into the stone at the crossroads of the passages, but they weren't stopped by anyone — hardly even got a second glance, honestly. After a long, slow walk, the smugglers struggling to push their goods up inclines, they eventually came out into open air again.

A short time zigzagging through buildings, most dark and quiet in sleep, they stepped out onto the Long Stair's street, empty but still dimly illuminated by lamplight. (Marian suspected they were enchanted, or possibly of dwarven make.) Their voices hushed in the quiet of the night, they moved to the base of the next section of the Long Stair, the smugglers fiddling around at the bottom of the wagon, attaching it to the track in the middle of the stairs — there was a metal strip in the center, which Marian knew by now was something called an elevator, a device designed by the old Tevinters to more easily move things up and down the steps.

Not that she had any idea how the thing worked. People assumed it used magic somehow, but if it did Marian would think the Qunari would have torn the thing out during their occupation. All they had to do was hook the wagons onto the track in the middle — all the wagons and things used in Kirkwall had attachments added for it — then pull a nearby lever, and the elevator worked on its own, dragging the wagons upward with a metallic rattling and ratcheting. There was a lock holding the lever closed, but licensed merchants were given a key to it, and for whatever reason one of the smugglers happened to be carrying one.

The elevator was rather loud, though. By the time they got to the top — they were on the second-highest step, Marian could tell now, the fourth arrondisse — they'd attracted attention, a couple city guards wandering over before they'd gotten the second wagon detached. Marian was worried they'd have a fight on their hands for a second, but one of the smugglers bluffed their way out of it, saying oh, they'd gotten behind schedule today, these things happen, these people? well, you know how dangerous it can get on the streets at night, couldn't blame him for taking precautions. The guards bought it, eventually wishing them a good night and wandering off again. The smuggler did present the key he'd used to unlock the elevator, which might have helped, but still.

Anyway, a short walk after that, and they arrived at a large storage space attached to a shop, which was apparently where they were putting all this. Out of curiosity, Marian peeked into one of the crates, casting a little bit of fadelight through the gaps so she could see properly. This one was filled with sacks of... They had HARINA sketched on them, but Marian didn't know what that meant, or even what language it was in. (Not Orlesian, she didn't think, maybe Nevarran?) The sacks themselves looked rather like the ones from the mill back home, maybe they were flour.

But that couldn't be right, why would they bother sneaking around at night with flour? She checked a second crate, greenish fadelight playing over— No, she didn't know what those were. Fist-sized orange things, they might be fruit? Not one she recognized, but she didn't know what else they could be. But that couldn't be right, because it was Cloudreach, what kind of fruit was harvested in Cloudreach?

She was absorbed staring at the things long enough someone came up to her, she barely managed to put the light out before it was seen. The smuggler wasn't annoyed with her poking around, seemed more amused than anything. After a brief talk, he cracked open the crate and handed one of them over to her. Out in the open, it was rather darker than she'd thought, more an orangish-red, just a little bit of a give to it under pressure, the skin smooth and...almost waxy? Not really, but. It seemed like a very big cherry, kind of?

The others thought it was weirdly funny that she'd never seen a plum before — that's what these were, they'd been mentioned in a couple of her parents' books but they didn't grow in Ferelden. (Or at least not around Lothering, maybe they did have them further north.) Rolling her eyes at them, she bit into the thing, and woah, that was juicy...

After stopping by the League's post and getting paid — Marian again told them to keep it and take it off her debt — she started back toward their dortoir with Gerael. She was still confused, so along the way he explained just what the hell that had been about. Apparently, those wagons had all been loaded with food, shipped in from Nevarra by way of Jader...which was actually further away from Kirkwall than Nevarra, she was pretty sure? Well, not really, but she thought going to Cumberland then Jader and then Kirkwall should take significantly longer than just Cumberland straight to Kirkwall.

There were ways to preserve food with magic more or less indefinitely — Marian was aware, Father had mentioned it, though it required proper enchanting so it wasn't something they'd been able to do. The plums were grown around the Black Minanter, in the north of Nevarra near the border with Tevinter, chilled with ice magic at the Circle in Trevis so they'd last longer, and then were shipped down the river and the Highway to Cumberland, where the largest Circle in all the south happened to be located. Some of the fruit — not just plums, but a variety of other things too — were sold right away, but some were preserved by the Circle and kept in storage. They let them out in little trickles out of season, when those produced by other growers had long run out, scarcity driving the prices far higher than they would have been able to get for them at the proper time of year. It was part of how the Circle funded itself, made a fair amount of money for them.

Also, Gerael claimed tariffs were really high on Nevarran goods at the moment. There was a lingering three-way border dispute with Nevarra and Starkhaven, apparently, it was a whole thing. Normally, the food, much of it already more expensive than usual due to being out of season, would be taxed as it came off the ships at harbor, and then brought to certain specific shops held by members of a particular merchants' guild — they then nudged up the prices again, making things far more expensive than most people could afford. The grain wasn't too much of a problem, that they could get from inland, but the other stuff was just too expensive.

But there was a loophole. Smugglers had set up a trick where the goods were shipped to Jader, the contents switched to new crates (so they didn't have Nevarran customs seals), and then shipped back across the sea to Kirkwall. Goods from Jader were inspected much less thoroughly, so they could get them unloaded pretty easily, and then sold them from shops owned by the syndicate or used them themselves in refectories (and brothels). This particular trick had been going on for a while now, the smugglers involved had been working with the Coterie before but had switched to the Blackthorns just last year.

That seemed...far more complicated than necessary. She didn't know what she'd expected when she'd been told Athenril's people were involved in smuggling — she'd thought, maybe, weapons, or poisons or something, maybe lyrium? Apparently it was mostly ordinary, everyday things people needed, just slipped past the authorities to avoid tariffs and taxes and merchant guilds. Marian didn't know what to think about that.

In any case, she hadn't been up nearly as late as she'd thought she would be, it turned out she needn't have worried about sleep so much. Over the next few days she escorted more smugglers through the city, usually only a single shipment a night, once they did two. She didn't bother asking what they were doing or peeking into the crates again, just assumed it was all perfectly innocuous like the first time. They all went smoothly, maybe a guard might talk to them quick in passing, but no difficulties other than that.

Until the fifth night. The walk down to where they were meeting the smugglers was much longer this time — it was hard to judge distance underground, no landmarks to measure their progress, but it had to be miles, longer than their walk up to hightown that first night. The passages got smaller, rougher, and quieter as they went, leaving behind the inhabited areas of the old mines entirely. The last section of their walk was taken in eerie near-silence, the only sound the tromping of boots and clinking of their things with each step, the low rasp of breath, seeming to fill the air around them until it had a physical weight, the only light the single lamp carried by one of the men, a little bubble of life in the shadows, beyond its circle of light both behind and ahead of them nothing but thick, murky, impenetrable blackness.

Eventually, Marian started to hear something else, low and muffled, it took a few more minutes to get close enough to recognize what it was: the crashing of waves against the shore, the constant, harsh rhythm growing louder with each step until the whole tunnel seemed to quiver with it, almost painfully loud, like standing inside a drum. She could smell the salt now, that odd taste of the sea on the air. They came to a bend in the tunnel, curving up to the left, but right at the corner there was a fissure in the stone, a dark sliver of the outside visible through it — though not much, it was dark out.

As one of the men hung the lamp up on a little hook in the fissure, Marian realized that wasn't the big pool Kirkwall sat on, they didn't have these kinds of waves in there. No, this was the Waking Sea — they must have walked all the way along the canal to the open sea, near where those enormous bronze statues were. Marian hadn't got a good look at the outside cliffs from the boat, and also she couldn't see much now, so she couldn't say where they were, exactly, but that was the only thing that made sense.

They waited for a time, wordlessly — the crashing of the waves was so loud they'd have to shout to be heard anyway — when something finally happened. There was a clanking from outside, just barely audible over the sea, one of the men stepped into the fissure and pulled out a heavy rope, a rusting iron hook on the end of it, wedged it against one of the inside edges of the fissure. A short moment later, and he was pulling a rough wooden box out of the fissure — about a foot and a half long, half that wide, and maybe a hand deep. He passed this box back to Gerael, who set it down on the ground, and then there was another box, another, another.

In total, there were twenty of these little boxes. A man squeezed through the fissure next, helped up by a hand from one of the guards — thick-armed with long scraggly hair, wearing rough, heavy clothing in dark colors, probably canvas. The first man was quickly followed by three more. Once they were all inside, the smugglers loaded the boxes into cloth packs, which were then slung over their shoulders, the lamp was removed from its hook, and they started off back the way they'd come.

Marian couldn't help but wonder what they were carrying. If they weren't even willing to risk bringing it through the docks at all...

The walk back was little different than it'd been the other way — soon the noise of the waves had faded to nothing, and they were travelling once again through suffocating blackness. There was a little bit of chatter going on between the smugglers and the guards, but Marian wasn't really paying attention, too distracted with the suspicion that she'd involved herself in something immoral. It was really inevitable that she would at some point, the syndicate (or at least portions of it) were criminals, but that didn't mean she was comfortable with it. Eventually they left the empty, isolated passage along the canal, the tunnels again showing signs of inhabitation here and there, the sound and smell of nearby people, passing through the occasional little underground village.

There was no warning at all before the attack came.

They were in a more open area, the walls peeled back to form a sort of circular courtyard around a big pillar in the middle like a great tree. It was mostly dark, night having long fallen by now, much of the space concealed in murky shadow, but there were a few lights here and there, lamps in one or another of the connected rooms giving little bursts of color, streaks of light slashing through the blackness. They moved slowly, picking carefully over the uneven ground — it was very dark, bad enough Marian wondered how the others could even tell they were going in the right direction, and there were occasional rusted hunks of abandoned mining equipment or flimsy shacks (some of them clearly abandoned, collapsed and moldering) and even a few people huddled up against the wall, they had to be careful not to bump into anything or step on anyone. But there were a few lanterns, revealing the obstructions much more clearly, their group sped up a little each time they stepped into light.

They were in the middle of one of these patches when they were rushed by people from all directions — a couple even came from somewhere up the wall on the left, had they dropped out of a window or something? They were unarmored, wearing cheap wool and canvas, stained and ragged with age, carrying knives and one a pickaxe. (It looked modern, which was odd because they didn't do any mining here anymore, he must have gotten it from somewhere else.) Looming out of the darkness, they were on them before anyone could hardly react, the air rang with shouts and the scrape of weapons being drawn, Gerael ducked a blow from the pickaxe, blood splattered onto the stone floor as one of the guards slashed one attacker across the stomach.

Marian skipped back away from a stab from one of the attackers, bumping into a smuggler. Freeing one of her daggers, pushing magic through her limbs to make herself faster — though subtly so, probably not enough it'd be suspiciously unnatural — she darted forward and struck at that first attacker's extended arm, the silverite blade biting through flesh and clinking off bone. The man screamed, the knife clattering to the ground, clutching his arm and limping away — that one was out of the fight. Another was rushing in at her, knife held high over his head, Marian dipped down and pushed forward, her armored shoulder driving hard into his gut, the breath whooshed out of him in a heavy cough. Knife dropping from nerveless fingers (bouncing against her back on the way down), he fell to his knees, Marian slammed her elbow into his head, he went limp and collapsed.

She glanced around quick, but it appeared to be over already. Most of the attackers had fled, all that remained were the one Marian had knocked out and two others. One was unmoving, face-down, she couldn't see any injuries from here but caught a wet glimmer in the lamplight, blood pooling underneath him; the other was on his knees, moaning and shuddering from pain and horror, his arms wrapped over a nasty gash through his middle, desperately trying to hold his guts from spilling out onto the ground. As she spotted him another of the guards stepped up, gripped him by the hair for leverage, and slit his throat. He toppled over, moaning cut off with gasping and breathless choking, but he was already beginning to slow, rapidly weakening from blood loss.

(Marian grimaced — that had been kind of gruesome to watch, but with an injury like that there was no way he'd recover. Putting him out of his misery was really the only thing to be done at that point.)

One of the guards had gotten a cut down his arm, already wrapping it and cursing under his breath. Gerael was on all fours, gasping for breath and shivering. Had he been injured? Marian wasn't a great healer, but if it wasn't too bad she might be able to help...

...Was that an arrow stuck in the back of one of the smugglers' packs?

There was a sudden shout of pain and one of the smugglers fell, an arrow sprouting from his shoulder. While the others crowded around him, the smugglers turning to put their backs in the way, Marian whirled around. To hit him at that angle it must have come from up...there — thirty feet up the wall was a gap in the stone, glowing with lamplight, shifting figures throwing wild shadows. She couldn't make anything out from this angle, but that had to be it.

She quick glanced over her shoulder, but there wasn't a passage out of this courtyard thing within sight, they'd be in the open the whole way. So Marian threw herself upward, her surroundings blurring into formless shadows as she flew, the gap in the wall swiftly approaching. It was smaller than she'd thought, she slipped to the side a little and surged inside — the spell was forced to a stop with an unpleasant, bone-deep throb as she ran into someone. The pair of them both toppled to the ground with a clattering of metal against stone, Marian pushed herself teetering to her knees, strangely dizzy.

A scrape of a drawn sword shook her out of her stupor — it wasn't just the archer, there were another three men gathered in a barren room, all armed and wearing peculiar splinted leather armor with red and gold sashes across their waists and chests. Marian nearly snapped off a bolt of lightning before remembering that was very loud — they were underground, it'd carry a long way, would probably have a dozen Templars running immediately — so she switched to fire instead. In a blink, two of the men had caught alight, screaming and flailing (Marian winced), though one managed to leap out of the way, rolling across the floor to her left. She popped up to her feet and darted after him, magically-enhanced steps almost silent against the stone floor.

There was a grunt of effort behind her, Marian whirled around on a heel, skipped backward — oh shit, there'd been another fighter hidden by the window, this one with a big damn battleaxe, she hadn't seen that one. He'd just finished a swing, the head clunking against the floor, if Marian hadn't moved when she had her skull would probably be split in half right now. The archer was standing again, his bow back in his hands and aimed toward her, drawing back, Marian drew up a handful of power and pushed, the archer was flung backward, hitting the edge of the window at the hips, sending him flipping head over heels as he toppled over, plummeting toward the ground below.

The remaining armed men had both recovered by now, and lept at her in a charge. That did make sense fighting a mage — they needed a second or two to get off a spell, the best chance a normal person had fighting one was to kill them before they could do anything — and from this close a distance would definitely have worked against Marian...before Ostagar, and the advice she'd gotten from Lýna. Marian threw as much power into her speed-enhancing trick as she could, enough she was swept head to toe with painful hot-cold tingles, skipped over to the side. The stab of the sword and swing of the axe hadn't stopped, but they'd slowed considerably, before the swordsman could react she'd already stabbed him in the gut, blood sluggishly dribbling over her fingers.

Yanking her dagger out, Marian took a step back, and the swordsman was shoved toward her, she skipped out of the way, the dying man missing her by a hair. The axeman stepped forward taking a sideways swing, Marian darted in at his left but the man had seen that coming, his knee already rising to kick, she stopped, dipped under the (relatively) slow-moving axe head. The man reached for her with his off hand, she moved to slip in at an angle again, but his axe was already swinging back the other way, she skipped backward again — shit, how was this guy doing that, she was twice as fast as him...

Fuck it. Marian cast herself into the air again, the room smearing around her, slipped between the ceiling and the man's head, wrenched her legs up and around — which was an awkward thing to do with the spell still going, the twisted magics shivering and sparking around her — planted her feet against the wall, coming to a sudden stop with a hard jerk, then pushed off again, but only for a blink, slamming into the axeman's back an instant later. She heard an odd muffled snapping noise (a rib, maybe?), Marian crashed to her knees, her head spinning from the reckless flying, but the man was knocked off his feet, fallen face-first, hissing out curses through his teeth.

Before he could recover Marian rushed toward him, dizzy enough she nearly fell right back over again, crouched down and stabbed into the back of his neck, at the join with his skull, leaning her weight into it. The silverite parted flesh and dug deep into bone — the man went still instantly.

Marian leaned forward to rest her forehead against the back of her hands, let out a thin, shaking breath, her limbs twitching with nerves. That had been close.

There was a shuffling, something scraping against stone, a gasping whimper — Marian lept up to her feet, glancing around. One of the men was still alive, the swordsman from before. He'd been making for the door out but he must have lost his balance, slid down to his knees against the wall just next to the doorframe. He must have hard her moving, stiffly turned around to lean his back on the wall. He'd gone pale, his face streaked with cold sweat, one hand pressed against a weeping wound, little rivulets of blood running down to pool on the floor.

"Per favore," he said, voice harsh and pained. "A Creatore, se hai un po' di cuore, no..."

Marian didn't understand a word of that, of course, didn't even know what language it was in. (Probably Nevarran or Antivan, but she had no idea which.) But she didn't have to understand it to know he was begging for his life. She hesitated, glancing around the room. The two she'd hit with that fireball hardly even looked human anymore — charred to black, flesh flaking, the bits of metal in their armor glowing slightly from the heat — the axeman still recognizable, the back of his neck split open, the inside of the gash filled with blood, slowly spreading across the stone around his head. A creeping pall settled over her, like near-freezing autumn rain dribbling down her back.

She'd never killed a person before. Animals, yes, darkspawn, yes, but...

But there was nothing she could do — that wound was deep, the rate blood was seeping out... This man was already dead, he just didn't know it yet. She might be able to heal him — maybe, if she was lucky — but if her job healing Carver was any indication she'd be exhausted by it, teetering on the edge of unconsciousness from burn-out. And she simply didn't trust this man not to cut her throat while she recovered.

Flames roared to life in her hand— "No! No, per—!" —and then spilled over the screaming man. Not any natural fire, with the amount of power she put into it, far too hot for that, searing wind whipping through the room, ruffling her hair and warming her skin like standing painfully close to the stove. She held the spell for five counts, then released it — all that remained of the man was a scattered pile of ash surrounded by scorched stone, blobs of metal glowing a moody orange-ish red.

A little shaky, Marian turned her back on the dead men and flew back out the window.

The arrow had been removed from the smuggler's shoulder, his shirt cut to reveal the wound, flesh roughly torn by the force of pulling the arrow out, blood trickling down his chest in thin lines. One of the men was holding his jacket against the wound, pressing down, while another roughly crushed herbs between folds of cloth, apparently making a crude poultice. Eyes flicked to her as she reappeared, nervous — none of them had known she was a mage before, Athenril was keeping that information close and Marian hadn't told anyone — ignoring her own feelings about what she'd just done up there, the looks from the others, Marian told them to get out of the way and she'd heal the guy.

The wound looked bad, but it wasn't actually that deep, his jacket and shirt having protected him somewhat. It didn't look as deep as Carver's that one time, at least, and was much smaller in area. But Marian didn't know much about healing magic at all, so she just threw power at it, willing the man be healed — blue-white light bloomed from her hands, blinding in the darkness, she grit her teeth at the magic surging through her, like swallowing too-hot cider but running through her veins head to toe, stinging and crackling. She held it for...well, she didn't know, exactly, she lost count pretty quickly. Longer than ten counts, shorter than a minute. As she let go of the magic all the strength went out of her limbs — her head spinning, vision going gray at the edges, hearing muffled as though from water in her ears — she started teetering over, would have collapsed to the floor if one of the men hadn't caught her. The worst of it only lasted for a few seconds, and her vision and hearing came back, leaving her sitting on the floor drawing thin, shaking breaths, limbs twitching with exhaustion.

So, easier than that time she'd healed Carver, but not by very much.

It took a little while for them to get moving again — which made Marian vaguely anxious, wouldn't someone come check out what had happened? (Naïve of her, in retrospect, there was no city guard in Darktown.) Which she wasn't annoyed about, the longer she waited the more she would recover from her near burn-out, it just didn't seem wise. Gerael handed her a bread roll he'd seemingly produced from thin air, a skin of beer, which helped a little. He kept giving her odd looks, not sure how to read those. Maybe wary of living with a mage? (Thankfully she wasn't delirious enough to blurt out that he didn't have to worry about her hurting his children — even if she were the kind of person to go around cursing people for no reason, it turned out elf kids were adorable.) The others had also decided to take a moment to rest, pulling out wineskins or bits of food squirreled away, the formerly-injured man making a temporary repair to his shirt.

The smugglers claimed to recognize the uniform of the man Marian had shoved out a window: the men in the room, who'd organized the attack, were in something called Brigau Rhuddion, which was complete nonsense to Marian, but by the grimaces crossing faces did mean something to most of the others. The name was Rivaini, apparently, they were part of the Felicisima Armada. The Armada didn't operate this far inland, cut off by the Fereldan raiders in the Alamarri Straits — really, they were only sort of Fereldan, the Kingdom hadn't been able to effectively rule the islands since before the Occupation — but the Brigau were one of the few factions in the Armada who did much of anything in Kirkwall. If people in the Armada were targeting the syndicate, that could get very bad very fast — not because the Brigau themselves were that powerful in Kirkwall, but because they had allies who could seriously mess them up if they wanted to.

Like the House of Crows, for example, the infamous Antivan guild of assassins. Yeah, Marian perfectly understood the grimaces now.

So, Marian asked what the hell they were carrying — after all, if the fucking Felicisima Armada decided to try to get it from them, maybe they just...shouldn't? She'd been worried it would be something, well, illicit, but it turned out it wasn't really: most of the boxes were packed with silk cloth, plus some fine gold and silver thread — apparently, embroidering with gold and silver was something people actually did, she'd thought that was made up — and dried herbs meant primarily for healing potions. Right, so people were willing to kill for it because it was worth a lot of money, nothing more complicated than that. That was...

Well. Marian still didn't know how she felt about this whole...smuggling shit, doing crimes thing. It wasn't something she'd ever imagined she would get wrapped up in before, and she'd literally just killed people...but the things they were smuggling were mostly innocuous. Hell, common people often couldn't afford healing potions at all, and very few had the education to do any alchemy themselves, if the syndicate used them to help their people they'd probably end up saving more lives than they'd taken just now — and that wasn't even getting into the people they'd be able to keep housed and fed from the coin they'd make off of the ridiculously fancy embroidered silk one of their members was apparently going to make...

It was extremely complicated, was the point. She felt so confused.

(That night, she had nightmares featuring the men she'd killed, screaming and cursing her as the flames consumed them, demons whispering into her very soul that she didn't have to do this, they would free her family and provide for them all they needed to live in comfort, if she would only ask for their help.)

(It wouldn't be the last time.)

Not long after that, Marian was switched back to guard duty. She hadn't actually asked anyone, but she suspected the League rotated their people between easier jobs, like guarding their members while they worked, and more risky jobs like smuggling. (The exception was people with certain skills, like Gerael, as she'd learn later.) Except this time she wasn't guarding anything so mundane and innocent as a weavers' house: this time, she was posted at a brothel.

Though, as unsettled as Marian had been by the news of what she'd be doing today, it ended up being just as boring and uneventful as her last guard job. This brothel was in lowtown, the thirteenth arrondisse, nowhere near as fancy of a place as the Rose, though the way the place was set up was actually very similar. (Or so she'd put together later, she hadn't actually seen much of the Rose yet.) The place basically doubled as a tavern — they served food and drink in addition to, well, other things — so there were sizeable kitchens off to one side, along with an underground storage space to supply it all. Most of the first floor was taken up with the main room (which they called "the floor"), a sort of dining hall place, little round tables with chairs scattered across the floor, an elevated section against one wall a stage, for musicians and also the occasional show. (Apparently, there was a lot of overlap between whores and actors, the shows they did at places like this were for practice and also just racey things no proper theater would go for.) The rest of the first floor had a couple private party rooms, for large groups of customers who came together...which seemed like a weird thing to do with your friends, but what did Marian know.

They didn't actually do stuff on the floor, instead bringing customers upstairs to the private rooms — Marian wasn't shown any of these. The guards arrived shortly after noon, well before the doors were open for customers. The workers were already here by then, the kitchen staff getting things going, most of the whores upstairs (getting ready, apparently), but a few were kicking around down here, sitting chatting, poking at this or that, one going around filling lanterns with oil from a can. When they realized Marian was completely new, one of the whores — an elf woman about Marian's age, with an odd-sounding name Marian was starting to recognize meant she was likely Qunari, her hair an inhumanly intense red, like Alim's — showed her around the place, everything on the bottom floor and then switchbacking through all the halls on the upper floor, but not actually showing her inside any of the rooms. She just needed to be able to find her way around in case anybody needed help up here. Didn't need to worry about keeping an eye out, if something came up they'd yell for them, it was fine.

Because Marian and the guards weren't to wait in the brothel proper. Instead they were put in a room between the floor and the entrance, where the customers left their cloaks and things. There were only two workers out here — a boy of maybe ten (probably one of the whores' kid), who kept track of the customers' things, and a woman about Mother's age lingering before the door, watching each person as they came in. There were several people who'd been banned for one reason or another, this woman knew all their faces and would have the guards kick them out if they showed up. Also, if she thought someone looked dangerous or suspicious or whatever, they wouldn't be allowed in either. Since this woman didn't exactly look intimidating, part of the reason the guards were posted here was to make sure people barred from entry actually took it seriously.

Once they were open for the day, at some point in the mid-afternoon, the guards sat around a table in this entryway...and played cards. Seriously, that was all they did the whole night. People trickled in and out past them, the mixed smells of food wafted around, music and chatter and laughter ringing through, but nothing really happened.

Marian learned how to play Wicked Grace — they played dice games in Lothering, but not cards. Thankfully they were playing for fun, because if they were playing for coin she would have lost badly. Seriously, that was it, they didn't actually do anything, it was weird.

About halfway through, well into the evening, a handful of workers came out with dinner and drinks for them, laying it out joking and laughing. While setting a tankard of cider in front of Marian, one of the women flirted at her...she was pretty sure? The words were innocuous, pointing out that Marian was pretty tall, they did make them big in Ferelden — people could tell by her accent, apparently it was very obvious — but something about the lilt on her voice and the smirk on her lips was... She didn't know, Marian would admit she hadn't any experience at all in this sort of thing. She'd literally never flirted with anyone before, and she thought she could count the times people had come on to her back home on her fingers — when she was younger word had gotten around she wasn't interested pretty quickly, the local men had given up on her before she turned seventeen. (A few people had openly said they'd take sex in trade if she didn't have the coin, but that didn't count.) So Marian had absolutely no idea how to respond to this, even though she was only joking around, it was just...

Uncomfortable, it was just extremely uncomfortable. It didn't help that the way the woman's northern-style dress draped over her made her figure very obvious, Marian had already been trying not to stare, because apparently she had a thing for elves, which could be, just, intrusive and distracting at times — she was starting to miss when she'd thought she just wasn't attracted to anyone at all — and she was still just smirking down at her, standing too close, and Marian had no idea what to say, and worse than that it was as though she'd temporarily lost all ability to speak, she just blinked up at her like an idiot, and Andraste have mercy, was she blushing, shit...

When the workers left the rest of the guards immediately started up teasing her over her embarrassing moment of speechlessness. It only got ten times worse when she, like a complete fucking idiot, admitted she was still a virgin (she was twenty-one, yes really, she wasn't joking) — she wasn't even sure how the conversation had ended up going in that direction, she just, ugh. Marian folded her arms on the table, resting her head down on them, and waited for them to shut up about it, her face and neck burning.

Levin gave her a consoling, almost apologetic pat on the shoulder — she grumbled at him, which just made the others laugh again.

Other than her fellows occasionally humiliating her for their own personal amusement — she really shouldn't have admitted she was a virgin, they were never going to let that go — the next few evenings were as uneventful as the first. There was one incident where one man was refused entry but he tried to blow the woman at the door off, pushing past her — the guards standing up, hands going to the hilts of weapons, had him backing off instantly, he fled back outside with no further protest. It was all smooth and routine enough, Marian couldn't help wondering why they had guards here at all. Honestly, they were basically being paid to sit around and play cards, it was slightly ridiculous. Though again, she wasn't complaining, it was better than being forced to kill people.

(She was still having nightmares about that a week later, at this point she wasn't expecting they'd stop any time soon.)

The first time something serious happened wasn't until halfway through the week. The evening had gone pretty much the same as any other, Marian and Levin and the other guards — she was usually always with Levin or Gerael, but the others in her group were different every job, she normally forgot their names pretty quickly — just sitting at their table, chatting and playing cards. There'd been a brief incident when a couple men had gotten into a rowdy argument on the floor, one of them had gotten kicked out, Marian didn't know what that had been about. (Two of the guards had gone to help deal with it, but she hadn't been one of them.) Same as the last few days, nothing really notable going on.

Putting it together from what she'd been told after the fact, Marian knew it must have started before they could hear it. There was music being played on the floor, flutes, things called vielles and a viol, which sounded confusingly similar and were mostly new to Marian — sort of like a lute, but played by dragging this weird stick holding hair stretched tight across the strings, coming in different sizes with different pitch ranges — and something called a douçaine, which seemed sort of like a crumhorn, but the tone was lower and smoother, a deep and pleasant sort of buzz, she actually quite liked it. And then there were the people on the floor talking, joking and laughing at their own table, yeah, it got pretty noisy in here. It wasn't really a surprise that they wouldn't be able to hear anything going on upstairs.

The first clue that something was wrong were the musicians cutting off, not all at once but gradually, the instruments going silent one by one. And then Marian finally heard the shouting — they were too far away to pick words out of it, but the tone came through clear enough: anger, fear. One of the whores poked his head through the door, flushed and wide-eyed, but by then they were all already surging to their feet, one mug tipping over to send beer sloshing across the table, one chair clattering against the floor.

People on the floor, obviously realizing something was happening, had drifted toward the bottom of the stairs, but they parted as the guards appeared to let them pass, a few people partway up the stairs rolling over the handrail and lowering themselves to the floor to get out of the way as fast as possible. (Which seemed unnecessary, but she understood how five armed and armored people charging in your direction could be kind of intimidating.) They rushed up the stairs, the pounding of boots and rattling of metal harsh on her ears, following the shouting turned down the hall toward the left. There were people in the halls up here too, whores and customers in various states of undress drawn out by the commotion, slipping back through doors or pressing themselves against walls to let the guards through. They took another left, finding a small crowd of people confronting a single man.

The man was human, maybe in his late twenties, with curly shoulder-length hair, beard shaven clean off his throat and cheeks but left thick and evenly-trimmed on his chin and upper lip — Marian knew enough by now to recognize this as the style of the wealthy here, this man must be relatively well-off, or at least someone who did business with the well-off. (Which raised the question of what the hell he was doing here, but she'd admit she had no idea how people decided which brothel to go to, so.) He was wearing trousers — cotton, dyed a deep blue, which wasn't cheap — but seemingly nothing else, his feet and chest bare. There were thin pinkish lines here and there on his forearms and one cheek, most shallow but a couple showing little beads of blood, his hair disheveled, a patch on one side of his forehead darkening reddish, like someone had whacked him over the head with something solid, but not hard enough to do much damage.

There was also a woman, an elf — Marian still wasn't great at guessing elves' ages, but she guessed she was about Marian's age, maybe a year or two younger — long blonde hair scattered around, hiding most of her face and draping over the man's shoulder. The man had one arm wrapped tight around her, pinning her arms to her chest, his grip hard enough her feet weren't even touching the ground. The angle her arms were being held meant one of her hands was visible from this angle — a couple of her fingernails had broken, probably from putting those scratch marks on him. Her breaths coming quick and thin, practically shivering from fear, she wasn't struggling anymore, despite the clear evidence that she had a moment ago.

Which probably had something to do with the sword against her throat. The man was holding her between himself and the group facing off with him, clearly threatening to kill her if they made a single wrong move. The blade was sharp enough, held close enough against the woman's neck, that it'd already broken skin, a thin, slow trickle of blood stretching down her chest.

Pushing through the crowd toward them, Marian belatedly noted that the woman was completely naked — she'd been rather too focused on the blade held to her neck to notice that at first. Apparently, like the men didn't grow facial hair, they didn't even have eyebrows, elves didn't get hair anywhere else on their bodies either. Weird.

The man got rather more agitated at the appearance of the guards, his grip on the woman only tightening, the trail of blood thickening a little, the woman wincing, a breathless moan of pain and terror slipping through her teeth. He was shouting at them, demanding they not come one step closer, let him through, he swore he would, don't even try it. A few of the guards had drawn weapons, a crossbow had appeared from somewhere — none of them had been carrying one a moment ago, it must have been kept upstairs — but none approached, forming a wall between the man and the crowd. Mostly whores, Marian noticed, the hard fury on their faces conflicting almost comically with their...insufficient dress.

(Though, maybe there wasn't as much of a conflict there as she'd assume — the only reason the syndicate had come to be in the first place was because the whores of the Blooming Rose had killed a bunch of Coterie thugs. It was just such a weird thought, she couldn't imagine something like that actually happening.)

But they didn't move any further than that. They couldn't move against the man while he had his hostage, not without risking the woman's life. Even taking a shot with the crossbow wasn't really an option — with the way he was holding her, it'd be much too easy to accidentally hit the woman instead, and even so, his death spasms could easily cut her throat open anyway.

There was a lot of shouting going on back and forth, but Marian wasn't really listening, gritting her teeth, her fists clenched around the hilts of her sheathed daggers. She didn't think there was any way out of this. They couldn't force him to let her go, they couldn't let him pass, they probably wouldn't be able to talk him down...

Levin gave her a significant look, head tilting in their direction in a suggestive sort of nod. Did...Levin know she was a mage? Gerael did, and they were cousins, but Marian didn't know if Gerael had told him — it'd been several days now, and Levin hadn't said anything, or given any indication that he was...that there was special reason to be wary of Marian. If Gerael had even told his wife, there'd been no sign of that either, Alya had been acting the same as always. Marian didn't know what she'd expect, but, at least she would think Alya should be slightly nervous about an apostate being around her children — which she really didn't need to be, but people had the weirdest ideas about mages — but if she were she had a really funny way of showing it.

Once, only yesterday, Alya had even come out into their aître to find Alex — their boy, maybe three or four — sitting in Marian's lap. She'd been reading when the (adorable) little shit had just walked over and forced his way up and asked what that was, he'd never seen a book so nice before. (Of course he hadn't, Father had stolen it from the Circle in Kirkwall ages ago.) She hadn't known what else to do, so she'd just gone along with it, and Alya had seemed more amused than anything, so...

Maybe they just...didn't care? That would be kind of strange, given how the Chantry spoke of apostates, and they were definitely Andrastian, but...

Marian grimaced, turned away to frown at the man and his hostage. She didn't think she could solve this with magic anyway. She was powerful, yes — according to her father, that is, and he would know better than her — but the things she knew how to do were somewhat limited. Elemental magic, she was pretty decent at that, but she couldn't hit him with fire or lightning without hitting the woman too, and ice had the same problems as taking him out with the crossbow. It should theoretically be possible to cast a barrier between them, force them apart, but Marian didn't trust herself to place it accurately enough. (She hadn't had much opportunity to practice shields, Bethany was actually better with them than she was.) She couldn't force him to sleep — falling asleep was actually a very complicated process, Father had been able to do it but she couldn't reliably, and trying something but failing might end very badly. That weird slicing white light Alim had used might work, if she just took off the man's head all at once the spasming probably wouldn't be a problem, but she didn't know how to do that at all. Despite it apparently being very simple magic, one of the first things they learned in the Circle, Alim had been surprised she didn't even know what it was...

Now there's a thought. One of the very first things Marian had learned how to do was move things without touching them — pushing them back and forth, lift them up into the air, whatever. It was the same basic thing as what she'd done to shove that archer out the window several days ago now, but it could also be used more...delicately than that. If she was careful.

Ooh, this was a terrible idea. But she didn't see any other options, so...

Taking a slow, deep breath, Marian opened herself up to the Fade. She held out one hand, fingers splayed, to help herself concentrate, and threw the magic out into the air — turning around, becoming almost solid, and pushing against the pair of them. Not just from her direction, or from all around them inwards — that would just push the sword deeper into the woman's neck — but against each part of their bodies from all directions at once. She didn't gradually push inwards, no, that would just have the man struggling, which might have him kill the woman on accident, she clamped down hard all at once.

The both of them went suddenly still, frozen in place, so rigidly neither of them could hardly twitch. Marian couldn't see her face, too much hair in the way, but the man's eyes sprung open wide, confused and terrified.

Her jaw clenched, fingers twitching as she tweaked the magic, she, carefully, forced the man's sword arm out, levering the blade away from the woman's throat, revealing the shallow cut in her skin. The hallway had gone almost eerily silent now, Marian could feel eyes on her, but she ignored it, focused on holding the spell as steadily as she could. His sword arm out of the way, she started on the other one. This was sort of harder to do, clenched tight around the woman as it was, difficult to separate them out, but she carefully, carefully, peeled his arm away, bit by bit. She thought she might have pinched his skin a little, but honestly she didn't care. After several long, slow seconds, that arm had been pulled away too.

The woman wasn't freed though, still pressed against the man's chest, held off her feet by Marian's spell. She could peel her away the same way she had the man's arm, but that probably wasn't the best strategy — also, while she didn't mind pinching the man a little by accident, she'd rather not hurt her. Instead she made sure she had a tight grip clenched around both the man's arms, and simply let go of everything else. The woman dropped to her feet, stumbled a couple steps and fell weak to her knees, taking harsh, gasping breaths. The man was breathing hard too, actually...

Had she been preventing them from breathing entirely? Oops, she hadn't meant to do that...

A few of the whores slipped through the line of guards and pounced on the woman, wrapping her up in their arms, a blanket from somewhere thrown over her shoulders, and she abruptly burst into tears, shivering and clinging back at them. A couple of the guards circled around them, approaching the man. He was babbling now, going on about how he hadn't meant to hurt her, he just wanted to take care of her, he loved her, why wouldn't they let him take her, it was their fault, them and their blood magic, Andraste curse them all—

One of the guards punched him in the head, hard — the man immediately went silent, slumping in Marian's grip, so she let go, he fell limp to the floor. The magic released, exhaustion dragged at her, nearly pulling her down after him. Her breath coming out in a shaky sigh, she bent over with her hands on her knees, tingling weakness spreading through her, a fresh headache sprouting in her head, Marian waited impatiently for the moment to pass.

Right. That had been...harder than she'd expected it to be. Here's hoping she didn't have to do that again any time soon...

"Are you okay?" Levin spoke rather cautiously, as though he weren't sure he should be asking.

"I'm fine, just... That wasn't easy." Standing straight again, Marian let out a last, long sigh. "I'm going to have a headache the rest of the night, but I'll be fine."

He gave her a sort of skeptical look, but nodded. "That... Was that blood magic? I mean, I'm not saying— The way you were controlling them..."

"I wasn't—" Marian huffed out a breath. Reaching out again, she plucked the man's sword up off the floor, floated it over toward them. "Moving things around with magic is pretty easy. I was holding them in place, not controlling them."

"Right..." Tentatively, he grabbed the sword by the hilt; she let go, and he nearly dropped it, surprised when the weight returned. "That's a neat trick. People can't cut you if they can't move."

"Oh no, I couldn't actually use it in a fight. It takes too much effort to do that on more than one person at once — holding one person still does no good if one of his friends can just run up and gut me."

"Yeah, yeah, that makes sense." Some of the tension dribbling out of his shoulders, Levin looked almost relieved. Which, she guessed that had probably been pretty creepy, so.

"Hey! Er, you, the mage — I don't know your name, sorry..." The women in the clump around the hostage had opened up a little, one of them looking her way. "Can you help with..." She trailed off, nodding at the hostage — there was a cloth pressed against her throat, swiftly reddening, the wound shallow but slow to close.

"Oh! Right, sorry, let me just..."

Over the next few minutes, there was some discussion about what to do next, primarily focused on the man, and what they should do about him — nobody came out and said it, but Marian got the feeling killing him and leaving his body in an alley somewhere was definitely one of the options on the table. This man had been seeing Nilda (the hostage) for some time, and had seemingly gotten a little too invested (which was apparently a thing that happened). He'd been talking for a few weeks now about Nilda coming to live with him, but she hadn't taken it seriously, people just said things sometimes. This time, it'd been very clear he was being serious, he wanted her to leave with him, tonight, and when she refused... Well, Nilda hadn't been able to continue the story any further, but she didn't really need to, it was obvious from that point.

The man had woken up, but was still rather delirious from the hit to the head. A couple of the guards gathered up his things from the room — except his coin purse, which they handed to Nilda instead (the whole thing, not just what she was owed for the night) — and dragged the half-conscious man out. He would be banned indefinitely, and before dropping him off the guards would have a talk with him about leaving Nilda alone. If she or her friends spotted him poking around, they might have to have another talk, go to the city guard if it came to that. Until they knew exactly how the guy was going to react, Nilda wouldn't be going anywhere alone, just in case.

That sounded...kind of paranoid to Marian. She muttered a question about that to Levin — he gave her a dumbfounded look for a couple seconds, before letting out a little scoff, right, he'd forgotten she was new, she wouldn't know. Apparently, it wasn't at all unusual for whores, if they didn't have the protection of a syndicate like the Blackthorns, to be abducted or even outright murdered, by a customer who'd gotten just a little too obsessive, or was angry with them for one reason or another...

...or just randomly out of the blue, sometimes by people they'd never even met before. A lot of people thought whores were just...somehow worth less than most other people, even the city guard tended to completely ignore it when they were murdered. It was actually a very dangerous line of work, and this was a big part of why. And sometimes, when they died (especially by violence or plague), some Mothers would actually refuse them services for the dead, which was, just— How was that even a thing?! Were Mothers allowed to just do that?! Sure, Marian was...uncomfortable with all this, but that didn't mean they weren't— That was, just, awful, she had no words.

So...Marian guessed she understood now why so many brothels had joined the syndicate. Just, Andraste have mercy, that was all seriously fucked up...

Once that was all straightened out, it was time for Nilda to go home — obviously, she was in no condition to work any more that night. Two of the other women were going with her (roommates?), but they wanted one of the guards to escort them, just in case. It was the middle of the night and, as Marian had just learned, the streets of this city could be dangerous for whores. After a little discussion, Marian was picked, and once the women had changed into normal clothes they left.

The women she was walking with, like the majority of the people working at that particular brothel, lived in the fifteenth arrondisse, which Marian had never actually been inside before. Every arrondisse had different rules about who could live there or own land or what could be done there. In almost every single arrondisse, it was illegal for elves to own land; the only major exception was the fifteenth arrondisse, where it was the exact opposite — elves could own land, but humans couldn't. For that reason, people usually called it the elven quarter (or even "Elveton", which Marian thought was very silly).

Of course, since most of the craft guilds and such also refused elven members, and the guilds pretty much controlled all the (legitimate) commerce in one way or another, the elven quarter was one of the poorest areas in the city. Most elves got by working as servants for wealthy people, wet-nurses — apparently, people who couldn't afford to stop working dropping their infant off in a house with several strangers to take care of them was just a thing that happened here, which was fucking weird — whores, and lots of different kinds of crime. Sometimes just working on their own, doing whatever they could to feed themselves — elven thieves prowling the alleys at night was a common theme in poetry and theater and stuff, in part because it really did happen — but they also ended up in the various criminal groups. They were common in the syndicates, not just the Blackthorns but the others around too, and also the...not so nice one. Apparently, the Carta took a lot of elves, which was odd, Marian had thought the Carta was a dwarf thing.

Marian had never been in the elven quarter, not because humans weren't allowed to walk around, she'd just never really had any reason to. And she didn't see much of it this time either. The buildings here were huge, built in the native black stone, some stretching what had to be ten storeys into the air, blotting out much of the sky on both sides of the street — original Tevinter insulae, she assumed, structures built to house slaves that had survived through the centuries to today. (With some repairs and alterations, but the buildings still stood.) She was pretty sure there was something painted on the walls, but it was rather too dark at the moment for her to make anything out.

She walked the three women up to their door, one of them — not Nilda, she'd hardly spoken since before they'd left the brothel, visibly exhausted and out of sorts — thanked her, and then they'd disappeared inside. Marian lingered for a moment, uncertain whether that was supposed to be a goodbye or if she was supposed to make sure they made it up to their rooms, before turning around and heading back toward the brothel. She managed to get lost along the way, because of course she did, this damn city with its damn tall buildings, she could never tell where she was going...

A few days afterward, Huziru unexpectedly turned up at the door of their cloître. Marian and Mother were the only ones in at the time — the rest of their housemates were off working or, in the case of Bethany, Gerael, Alya, and the kids, at the local Chantry. She had another evening job today, and she'd gotten into the habit of waking up around noon, she hadn't even been up that long yet. When she'd woken up Mother had already been scribbling something in a notebook she'd picked up at some point, making plans for her Orlesian lessons.

She did see Huziru around now and again, yes, but she rarely came up to their rooms to talk to them. The only times before now had been when there'd been a message for one of them, most often Gerael, about work plans being switched around. (Marian wasn't entirely certain what Gerael did — he'd been on her team for those smuggling jobs, but he wasn't actually part of the League.) Setting her half-patched trousers aside, Marian asked, "What is it, Huziru?" She'd noticed that Huziru wasn't much for small talk, preferred getting straight to the point. She kind of assumed it was a Qunari thing, but she didn't actually know.

Huziru lingered at the door, not moving to come inside, giving Marian one of her slow, warm smiles. "You have a visitor. Do you want to come down to meet her, or should I send her up?"

"Um..." She knew Huziru had rules about how things were done here, one of which was that she didn't just tell any old person off the street where in the building anyone lived — supposedly, she wouldn't even confirm specific people lived here at all to anyone outside the syndicate without permission. But that wasn't the thing Marian was confused by, she had no idea who the hell would be visiting her in the first place. It wasn't like she really had any friends here...or at least none who didn't already live with her, she guessed Alya and Gerael and Levin should maybe count. "Who is it?"

"Mm, elven woman, blonde, about yea high," she said, holding her hand level with her own nose. "I didn't catch her name, but she's wearing a thorn bracelet." Meaning she must be associated with the syndicate somehow.

That could describe far too many people, she couldn't guess who that was. Definitely no one who would come visiting her in the middle of the day. "Okay. I'll be down in a minute." Huziru slipped silently away, but Marian didn't follow her right away. Glancing down at herself, she wondered if she should change into something else. She'd decided to take the day to patch up some of her clothes, but she had enough to do she didn't really have any spare trousers to wear (unless she wanted to sit around in her stolen armor, anyway), so she'd borrowed one of Bethany's gowns instead. Which was fine for just sitting around at home, but she wouldn't go out in this — it fit her kind of...weird.

Obviously Bethany had cut the gown to fit herself, so it didn't really sit on Marian right — Marian was taller, yes, but Bethany's breasts were noticeably larger than hers. Which she'd always thought was odd — Beth'd had larger breasts than her since Marian had been about seventeen and Bethany twelve, honestly...

Oh well, it would probably be fine. If it turned out she had to leave the building she'd come back up and change first.

There was an open entryway on the first floor of the dortoir, where people would meet up sometimes — particularly, the young children and their mothers before going out to the refectory or the baths, sometimes a local Sister came by to teach the children stories and songs and things. It was mostly empty at the moment, a couple of Huziru's people wandering around, and a single woman standing not far from the exit.

She was immediately familiar, Marian had definitely met her, but she couldn't identify who she was at first glance. Her pale linen gown was decorated with beadwork in what Marian had learned by now was an elven style — gracefully curling and swirling lines in greens and yellows and reds — her hair pulled up and held back out of her face with a clip of some kind, wire and more beads. She did seem faintly nervous, hands picking at her sleeves, eyes trailing over the ceiling seemingly at random.

She noticed Marian almost right away, with a little twitch and a soft, "Oh!" A hesitant smile pulling at her lips, she said, "Hello, Hawke. How are you?"

It was still slightly strange to hear people call her "Hawke" — Father had gone by that, sometimes, some part of her still felt like they were talking to him saying it. Though, that was entirely her fault, since she started introducing herself with it. It'd occurred to her that, if the Templars heard people calling an apostate that they might think it was a nickname, like their apostate had named themself after the bird, and probably wouldn't track it back to her family. Commoners normally didn't have surnames anyway — the only reason Father had was because his family were long-established freeholders outside Redcliffe (they still lived there, Father just hadn't trusted them not to tell the Templars) — so even most Kirkwallers her family talked to had no idea their name was Hawke...they just thought she was weird, going around calling herself "hawk" all the time. Which was just fine, if it would give her family even a small layer of protection it was worth people thinking she was kind of eccentric.

But she still didn't recognize this girl. (Woman, really, younger than Marian but older than Bethany.) Stopping at a comfortable conversational distance, Marian muttered, a little awkwardly, "Alright." She'd admit she was terrible at smalltalk — though she hadn't always been that way, she assumed it was a consequence of spending years focusing all her time keeping the farm going and hardly ever talking to people when she didn't have business with them. "I'm sorry, do I know you?"

The woman's smile tilted, turning wry. "Er, Nilda?"

"Oh!" The whore from a few days ago, right. She looked...different. (Marian wanted to say normal, but that didn't seem quite right somehow.) "I'm sorry, I didn't recognize you."

Nilda seemed slightly amused about something, but whatever she was thinking she didn't say aloud. "Yes, and I almost didn't recognise you." Her eyes flicked downward for a second.

Marian grimaced, wrapping her arms around her waist. "I'm in the middle of repair work, this is my sister's. Um. Did you need something?" Couldn't imagine how she would, they didn't really know each other...

"Oh, no, I... I know, I never did thank you that night—" Nilda tensed, just a little, clearly uncomfortable talking about what had happened even that indirectly. "—and I just...thought I should."

"You really don't have to do that."

Her head tilting a little, giving Marian a flat look, Nilda said, "Hawke, you saved my life."

...Well. "I guess, I meant... I was just doing my job, you know, you don't owe me anything."

Nilda's lips twitched a little. "I know it's...risky, doing it the way you did. People saw. You didn't have to do that, not really."

Except, she kind of had, though. It wasn't just Levin, Gerael and that smuggler team, but Athenril and certain others high up in the syndicate knew she was a mage too. Yes, someone might go and tell the Templars (which she was already taking precautions against, like not using her first name), but she needed to keep Athenril happy for her family's sake, and letting her people die when she could do something about it wouldn't exactly do Marian any good there — it'd been a risk, but a calculated one.

Was what she thought about it now but, to be perfectly honest with herself, none of that had occurred to her at the time. She hadn't thought of the potential consequences at all, she'd just...realized she could help, and she'd done it. Someone had been in lethal danger, right in front of her, and she... Well, she probably should have thought about it first, but she just hadn't.

She was slightly irritated with herself, looking back on it. Acting out in the open without thinking like that was a great way to get herself hunted by the Templars. She would trade Nilda's life for her family's, if it came down to it — she might feel a little guilty about it afterward, but she would do it. It simply hadn't occurred to her that was the risk she'd been taking at the time. She had to be more careful. She could have demanded everyone else get out of the hallway first, at least...

But she couldn't say any of that to Nilda. And she really had no idea what else to say either, so she just gave a helpless shrug.

For some reason, Nilda seemed a little amused again. "I haven't gone back yet, to, you know, so I've had some time on my hands." She pulled something out of one of the pouches hanging from her belt, glass beads twinkling in the sunlight coming through the door. Holding it up toward Marian, she said, a little bashfully, "I made you this."

Um...okay? Out of a lack of any better idea what she should be doing right now, Marian just took it. It was a band of sturdy linen canvas, a few fingers wide, with more beadwork on it, much like Nilda's gown. Not just random patterns, though, these were actually recognizable shapes. Running down the middle, a strip of black beads kinking back and forth, that was a thorny vine, like a lot of people in the syndicate had. At one end was what was obviously meant to be a Chantry sunburst, at the other end...the Eye of the Maker? It was kind of hard to tell, the round, curling shape of the Eye was difficult to make with beads like this. Between the two were a column of letters, the vine twisting around to make space for each: — which was, of course, complete nonsense to Marian. "Um..."

Nilda smiled. "That's all I came here for. If you need to get back to work..."

"Right." This was...weird. She had no idea how to respond to this. "Oh, did you need someone to walk you back?"

"No, my cousin's waiting just outside. Thank you again, Hawke." Dipping in a shallow little curtsey (she thought?), Nilda said, "Walk in the Light of the Maker."

Before Marian could figure out what the hell she was supposed to say, Nilda was already gone.

She drifted back upstairs, absently staring down at the thing in her hand. Was it supposed to be a bracelet? It seemed a little long for that. Also, this just seemed like a...sort of strange thing to do? Was Marian missing something? Was this just a thing people in Kirkwall did sometimes? She was still new here, obviously, she didn't expect to know everything, there could be all kinds of little traditions she hadn't run into yet...

"Marian? Is something wrong?"

She blinked. While she'd been not really paying attention, she'd managed to walk all the way back up to their aître. Mother was sitting over there, giving Marian a half-way concerned sort of look, and—

Mother. She was from Kirkwall, if this was a Kirkwall thing she might know what it was about. "Oh, nothing, um, somebody just gave me this." Walking over, she held it out to her. "Do you know what this is?"

Mother gently took it, turned it around so she could make out the letters. "Oh, that's sweet. Did you help this girl?"

"Yeah, a few days ago, somebody was trying to hurt her. Why, what do the letters mean?"

Turning a smile up at her, Mother took her hand, wrapped the cloth around her wrist, once all the way around and then again, started fiddling with the ties on the ends — this was actually pretty close to the right length, apparently it was supposed to go around twice. "Heureux les gardiens de la paix, qui sont les champions des justes."

Marian grimaced. "I still don't speak Orlesian, Mom."

"I know, dear. I'm only telling you what it says." Turning the bracelet, now tied on, around her wrist, Mother pointed at one letter after the other. "Heureux, gardiens, paix, qui-sont, champions, justes. It's an initialism — people do that all the time with certain phrases from the Chant, since embroidering full sentences into anything would be far too time-consuming."

Right, that made sense, some people did a similar thing back home. "Okay, and what does it mean in Alamarri?"

Letting go of Marian, Mother sat back in her chair, giving her an enigmatic smile. "Blessed are the peacekeepers, the champions of the Just."

...Oh. Well, Marian had no idea how to feel about that.

"It's an old courtship custom among the Orlesian nobility, young lords and ladies giving favours embroidered with initialisms of verses from the Chant — this is one of the more common ones, given to those thought to be particularly gallant. Oh!" Mother let out a little gasp, her eyes widening. "I don't mean I think this girl meant it in that way, you understand, that's just where this sort of thing came from. Things like this slowly spread into the commons, and often lose parts of their original meaning. I doubt she's trying to, well. That wouldn't make much sense, for multiple reasons."

Because Nilda was an elf, they were both women, and also dirt-poor peasants — obviously how the nobles go about courting each other would have no bearing on them at all. "I didn't think that's what you meant, I just... Well, I just don't know how to feel about it, is all."

Mother smiled. "I think it's sweet. She was only trying to thank you, you needn't feel obligated to do anything in return."

"No, that's not what I..." Marian sighed, glancing away. She still wasn't sure how she felt about this... The syndicate, and the people in it, and the work they were doing for them, she still felt conflicted about it. They weren't nearly as bad as Marian had feared when Gamlen had told them he'd gotten them help from criminals, that her family would be indebted to them for who knew how long, but as much as they might not be completely terrible people every single one of them, they were still criminals. Or, some of them were, at least — that weavers' house a couple weeks ago, the brothel, those were both perfectly legal...

But then, on the other hand, Marian had killed people while illegally smuggling things past the local authorities. (She hadn't stopped having nightmares about that yet.) But, on the other other hand, those people she'd killed had been part of the Felicisima Armada — some parts of the Armada were worse than others, but they were all pirates. The syndicate hadn't turned out to be nearly as nasty as she'd feared, but they were hardly perfectly clean either.

Blessed are the peacekeepers, the champions of the Just. Looking down at the beaded band wrapped around her wrist, Marian wasn't certain whether she wanted to laugh or cry — she was no such thing.

(She hadn't thought about it. She'd just done it.)

Marian let out a heavy sigh, doing her best to shake off the conflicting, confusing thoughts picking away at her. "I know. I had a few more things I wanted to finish before my job tonight."

"I'll let you get back to it, then." Her brow creasing a little, Mother's mouth opened, as though to say something, but she hesitated, frowning up at Marian for a second. Then she smiled, and turned back to her notes. That was weird. Brushing that moment off, Marian returned to her chair and got back to work, random glimpses from the past few weeks flickering through her head — her eyes drawn again and again to the letters circling her wrist.

For the first time, Marian seriously considered what those smuggled goods would mean for the syndicate's people, how the weavers and the whores must feel about the armed men and women guarding their door.

(Blessed are the peacekeepers, the champions of the Just.)

Marian sighed — she was starting to miss the world where criminals were criminals, and everything had been far more simple. But she'd left Ferelden behind, and who knew how long it would be until they could go back, if ever. The Blight could last for years, their farm was already gone, and...

And they were in Kirkwall now. Apparently, even things so basic as criminals are bad just couldn't be that simple over here. Not that she was complaining, mind — she'd rather not be killing people every night, thanks. It was just seriously fucking confusing, was all.

...Nilda making the bracelet for her was sweet, though. She guessed that'd just have to be enough for now.

---

[apparently there wasn't a good Alamarri equivalent] — There actually is a good Alamarri equivalent: both Aedan and Alim would refer to dortoirs as apartment blocks. The terminology they use for these things in Kirkwall is from Orlesian (due to the relatively recent occupation), and Leandra has never lived in any other Alamarri-speaking city, so she simply isn't aware of this.

Aître — This is being used in the original Roman sense of atrium (the central room of a domus) and not the later monastic use. Due to lingering Tevinter influences at home and contact with the modern Imperium abroad, the original use of the term stuck around in Orlesian when it didn't in irl French. ("Atrium" was re-borrowed into French in more recent centuries, because languages are silly like that.)

The Felicisima Armada and the Raiders of the Waking Sea — To clarify, in canon these are two names for the same thing, but I've split them into two different groups. The Felicisima Armada (the international name, not what they call themselves) were formed during the Qunari Wars from a collection of legit merchants and remnants of the Rivaini navy, but also smugglers and pirates, in an attempt to organize resistance against the Qunari, basically privateers allied with the Queen of Rivain (in exile on Llomerryn from the occupied mainland). The Armada is still technically sworn to the Queen — members are often also part of the Rivaini navy, and they administrate Llomerryn, Estwatch, and Hercinia in the name of Rivain — but at this point are basically all pirates and smugglers, with the occasional legit trading run for flavor. They're mostly made up of Rivainis and Antivans, plus a sizeable minority of Tevinters, other ethnicities very rare.

The "raiders of the Waking Sea", on the other hand, are almost universally Alamarri, with some significant Avvar influence. They're centered on a region referred to as the Alamarri Straits — the islands and straits and bays roughly within the triangle formed by Ostwick, Amaranthine, and Denerim, where the Waking Sea meets the ocean. The islands are split into bannorn like anywhere else in Ferelden, but the local people frequently ignore the King in Denerim, effectively operating like independent petty kingdoms...and also raiding their neighbors and passing merchant vessels. The banns of these lands are in a weird halfway position of being sort of nobility, while also basically being pirate kings. Aedan and Fergus's grandfather — the one with the cool pirate nickname of "Storm Giant" — was one of these semi-legit banns.

There are also smaller groups on the islands in the Firth of Dane, just south of Kirkwall — most "raiders of the Waking Sea" seen in Kirkwall will usually be these guys — but they're outlaws without the semi-legitimacy of the banns in the Straits.

[Heureux les gardiens de la paix, qui sont les champions des justes] — "Heureux" literally means happy or lucky. The form of these verses in the Chant (Benedictions 4:10-11) instantly reminded me of the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3-12), I can only assume the very similar phrasing used is an intentional reference. The Beatitudes in English use "blessed are," just like the Chant, but the French version I found says "heureux". ("Blessed are the pour in spirit / for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven" = "Heureux les pauvres en esprit / car les Royaume des Cieux est à eux") So, I just decided to use the same form for the Orlesian. I'm not sure the use of "qui sont" or "des justes" here is correct, but it's fine if it comes off weird and poetical (it is poetry), and also I don't speak French xD

---

Poor confused Marian xD

omg why am I such a wordy bitch? There was another whole scene planned, but I didn't want this chapter to top 30k words (again), so I've moved it to the next Marian chapter instead. Jesus.

I've been trying to write for the Plan lately (and having limited success, writing is hard), so The Good War may or may not be on a brief hiatus until I get back into the swing of things, but I will keep writing for this fic. Due to my plans getting away from me again, the next chapter will be things going on with the Wardens in Redcliffe, and they won't actually leave until the chapter after that, their arrival in Orzammar the chapter after that, pushing my previous predicted itinerary back a chapter. As I've mentioned before (only in comments on AO3, I think?) the stuff with the Anvil of the Void has been cut, but I hope you'll get a kick out of what I'm doing instead. Orzammar is a bit of a mess, actually, should be fun.

Lately I've been considering starting a YouTube channel, where I'd mostly babble about history and literature and worldbuilding and conlanging and politics, just whatever sounds interesting to me at the time. If anyone would be interested in seeing that, neat. I think that's all I had on my mind...

Oh, by the way? Decriminalise sex work now.

—Lysandra