The People cried out in despair:

Alas, that we ever left Vol Dorma!

Shartan 9:1-3.

Not even the Elvhen language, with all its delicate nuances and intricacies, held an expression that might have encompassed the hatred Abelas felt towards Veldrin Lavellan.

He'd not hated her from the very beginning, of course…on their very first encounter, the sensation had been one of condescension, rather than outright hatred; if the Elvhen Sentinel had held more knowledge of the world he'd awoken into, he might have realised that the way in which he regarded Veldrin was not at all dissimilar to the way in which most of the Dalish regarded city elves, or elves that had taken to Andraste – cowards at best, traitors at worst, merely Shem'len with pointed ears. Not kin, but simply the very last pitiful, dying embers of a mighty fire.

Seeing Solas amid her group had surprised him, but only for a short while, for it had taken him very little time to understand what the Dread Wolf was doing. Like Solas himself, he had immediately recognised the Orb Corypheus had carried into the Temple of Mythal, and grasped the dire necessity of recovering it, no matter the cost; he'd even accepted that if the woman might have chosen deadly confrontation, Solas could not have left her side, and had been prepared to sacrifice himself and his fellow Sentinels to preserve Solas' cover, because he alone was hope of restauration…It was in the Dread Wolf's nature to follow his goals no matter how cruel or convoluted the path, and, because Mythal had held utter trust in the fact that Solas goals ultimately served the greater good, Abelas' faith in one of the very few he still recognised as Elvhen had been absolute as well. He'd had no doubt that Solas had convinced the little woman who temporarily held powers beyond her comprehension to walk the petitioner's path; in Abelas' mind, there was no question that the Dread Wolf alone had engineered that the Sentinels be spared.

But then…

The truth he regarded as abominable had descended upon him not in a trickle of observation, but in a veritable revelatory hurricane; the man who would probably sacrificed Abelas and his host without blinking had not been able to either kill this insignificant, and now useless woman, or let her die. His vaunted ruthlessness stopped with her – in great horror, Abelas had seen…understood that Solas loved her, and that whatever power he held over her, she too had power over him. The Dread Wolf of legend would have thought nothing of sleeping with her, if it meant leading her astray, but Solas had not touched her... It had been then that the first seed of hatred had sprouted, and since, it had blossomed into a forest of sharp thorns and putrid blossoms.

Though Solas had not spoken on the subject, his pain and sense of betrayal when she had married to Tevinter had been tangible – he had, perhaps, expected that Veldrin Lavellan would eventually find a mate to be bonded with; with each year that passed with her not even searching, Abelas had sensed his friend falling to deeper and deeper melancholy, for there was no greater torment than hope, no matter how foolish. Weeks passed, then months; a year, then two, then three, with her still waiting. Still remembering, still hoping, in a way which, for a mortal, could only have been described as madness.

True Elvhen such as Solas could easily afford such lapses. To him, who counted millennia as heartbeats, three years were the bat of an eyelid. To her, an already grown mortal woman whose days were counted in more ways than one, a woman perhaps already over-ripe for children, such lengths of time in celibate solitude were sheer folly…But still, as if unaware of her condition, she waited, and with each day that passed, the weight on Solas' heart grew, because each day brought further proof that she had truly loved him, and that, for the first time in his long years, he had caused harm without reason or goal.

It was because he understood the man he'd come to think of as a friend that Abelas had not come to doubt Solas even when he had let her live…even when he had told her enough ancient truths to empower her…Not fully, still…Abelas guessed that Solas thought Veldrin's devotion deserved at least this, and had earnestly been relieved when she had not been able to altogether sway his heart, as the Sentinel had feared she might have.

Then, like a rattlesnake, she'd swiftly spun around and bit.

Not only had she taken a human for a mate, but one of the accursed, slaving usurpers. It was one thing, Abelas had thought, that the woman did not understand the cause of the true Elvhen. Actively opposing it, with Tevinter's aid, was an entirely different level of treason. Indeed, now the seed of hatred had sprouted and spread, and he'd thought he could hate her no more, which had been, for the moment, a great relief – hatred clouded the mind, poisoned the body and beckoned demons to one's dreams. Too much of it ended up suffocating the one who carried it in their heart, and so, for a while, Abelas had been grateful that his limit had seemingly been reached.

He'd been painfully wrong.

After years of relative distance, in which the brambles of his hatred had thinned, or simply dried out for lack of novelty, the events of the past few months had caused them to find new, vibrant roots in fertile soil.

His own reason had dictated that the woman was poison, but could never constitute a genuine danger – the only true danger he had sensed was the weakening of Solas' focus, when the Wolf had thought his vhenan in danger. Precious resources had been diverted to the aid of one who only intended treachery most foul, but then, to Abelas' eyes, Solas had recovered, and regained his determination. Not for a moment had he thought Veldrin and her human following capable of awakening the Forgotten Ones. Never, in his most terrible dreams had Abelas imagined that this woman, this poisonous woman, would be able to defeat him.

Nor, in his most terrible dreams had he imagined what sort of swift and terrible disarray their carefully constructed and hard earned corner of the world would fall into in his absence – and, as the Elvhen language had no words to describe what the Sentinel felt for Veldrin Lavellan, it had no curses strong enough to describe his frustration at having to nudge his way through a baying mob, a gathering of people as closely knit together as the thorny vines of his hatred were.

Crowds parted for Solas; clearly, they did not part for him – when Abelas and his two companions finally made their way through, however, all three stood aghast.

Arlathan did not have a central marketplace, not yet, at least; the skills that the people had brought with them, the variety of habits and trades that they practiced had not yet meaningfully mashed together, and the nations from which the various people hailed, Dalish clans aside, still preferred to mostly mingle with their own. There had been squabbles over the past years, Abelas knew – the Fereldan elves were none too friendly to the Orlesian ones, the city elves thought little of mages, the Dalish were aloof and distrusting of all flat ears, the city itself still required much reconstruction…Under different circumstances, the Sentinel told himself, the fact that people from so many different lands had gathered together of their own volition might have been regarded as a good sign. It still wasn't one.

The elvhen had gathered in a tight circle about a young woman; her clothes were torn, showing she had been dragged to the place, and her face was scratched and bruised. Curled in the dust, she wept, her small hands, with torn and filthy fingernails, were crossed protectively over her rounded belly.

He didn't understand.

'What law could she possibly have broken…' Abelas began, looking over his right shoulder to Samson, a city elf from Denerim that he'd taken into his close council because he was a straight-talking man with the build of a bull. In his life before this one, he'd been used to fight for the entertainment of the Shem; he bore many scars, but he'd survived unscathed in other ways, for his heart was still good to its core.

'Ha?' Samson shouted back; still, Abelas could only make out the word from the movement of the other elf's lips.

In the crowd, the men outnumbered the women ten to one, Abelas reckoned, but the women, in particular, looked bloodthirsty and wild. The target of the court of the people seemed to have lost her voice wailing; but for two others, a man in his prime and a woman past hers, who protectively stood above her – the man wielding a sharpened stick and the woman a hefty, wooden ladle – the young accused of an unknown crime might have been trampled to death.

'Adultery?' Samson once again shouted.

'Mais pas de tout,' the second of Abelas' companions purred; her low tone was far more discernible under the roar of the crowd.

'Speak normal,' Samson growled; the former Orlesian chambermaid who completed the informal, and, in Solas' absence, admittedly headless city council smirked. 'C'mon, Marguerite,' the Denerim gladiator said, lowering his voice in turn. 'That kid gonna get killed here…'

'Back off, ya fuckers!' the woman with the ladle screamed, waving the implement about as if it had been as threatening as a mace. 'D'ya not get she doesn't speak effing Elvhen?'

'Neither do you,' some Dalish woman piercingly shrieked, from the gathered mass.

'Dirtha-ma1, bitch!' the woman with the ladle defiantly responded. 'I speak enough of it to tell you to back off!'

She kneeled then, whispering into the young woman's ear; eyes wild with fear, the young one placed her arms around her shoulders with the look and bodily expression of one dangling above an abyss with only a handful of moss to grip.

'Marguerite,' Abelas quietly said. 'Help me. What is this?' he asked, hanging more hope on the question than he wanted to.

'The little girl, she is with child, non? Child not of man she has,' the Orlesian elf said. 'It is obvious, that.'

'That oughta get three screaming harpies, not a hundred,' Samson reasoned. 'Certainly no men…'

'Not if the child, he is Shem,' Marguerite said. 'That makes all the difference, is it not so? She speaks not the Elvhen, so she must be from Tevinter. When we took her, there are four months since, her burden, we saw it not – now it is that we can see it, and they can see it, and they want it dead.'

Abelas looked at the young woman and at her rounded belly, not knowing what to feel or do; Marguerite did not help by continuing to speak.

'If the Wolf Who Makes Fear was here, he would handle this swift,' she said.

'But he's not here, is he, and I'm not sure how even he would do this…' Samson snarled. 'You need to stop this, brother,' the man continued, turning to Abelas. 'I ain't gonna watch a woman with child be trampled to death, even if her child is Shem.'

'The Wolf Who Makes Fear would take her to the wild beyond the walls of the city sacred,' Marguerite implacably said. 'There, it would be her decision whether to leave the child of danger to our blood, or lie to death with him. Within our city there is no place for Shem, the pure blood, it must prevail.'

The Orlesian elf had eyes in the colour of honey, but cold was her voice, and cold was her stare, and there was cold and lack of any doubt in her heart.

'Ma serannas, Marguerite,' he said, stepping forth, as Solas might have; for the first time since he had met Solas in the flesh, his hatred of Veldrin Lavellan grew to cover him and smother him, too. It was comforting.

'Silence,' Abelas said, for a second getting a feel for what it must have been to be Solas, for the crowd grew silent. Where Solas himself might have summoned quiet out of adoration or fear, he merely summoned incredulity. He took advantage.

'How has this woman wronged you?' he asked, stepping to the pregnant girl's side.

A Dalish man, with the vallaslin of Elghar'nan responded, telling the Sentinel that the young woman had wronged the city by planning to bring another human into the world.

'But she ain't plotting an' scheming on doin' that, is she? This ain't some infiltration plot! She is but a woman heavy with babe!' the woman with the ladle spoke, standing. The girl held on to her knees.

'Who are you, that you speak to me thus?' Abelas asked.

'I was called Maeris by my master Halward Pavus. My second master, Dorian Pavus called me Maeris too, and the Magistra Veldrin…'

'Do not speak that name to me!' Abelas said; dark brambles of hatred knitted together, stealing his vision, so he stepped forth and hit the woman across the face before he realised he'd even raised his hand. The entire crowd reeled as the woman staggered a little, for he had not struck her that hard. Still, he sensed the change in the gathering's mood as keenly as a deer caught scent of a careless predator – the smell was conflicting however; most exulted satisfaction, yet some…some exulted disgust.

The one called Maeris by her Tevinter masters sustained his glance with narrowed, defiant eyes; the man with the sharpened stick stepped in front of her, and jabbed his makeshift weapon at Abelas' chest in pointless, but open rage.

'Yah, the Magistra Veldrin Pavus,' Maeris hissed, from behind her defender. 'An' none of 'em raised their voices, let alone a hand to me, like ya just did.'

Despite the heat of the jungle, Abelas felt as if ice had been flowing through his veins – his hatred, so comforting seconds before, had melted to shame so deep that he wished the earth beneath his feet would open and swallow him whole. Without looking over his shoulder, he knew that that, had it not been for the large group of stunned onlookers, Samson might have punched him in the face, and it would have been thoroughly deserved. Above all, he knew that Solas…Solas would not have done as he just had. Solas…

'Let's take this somewhere less…public,' Samson said, with remarkable calm in his thick voice.

'Oui, the concentration of the people is not making us favours,' Marguerite shakily whispered. 'That was not good, Abelas,' she said, hastily rushing past him, and somehow gracefully insinuating herself between Maeris and her frail, but determined defender. 'You have our sincerest apologies, Maeris of the House Pavus…'

'Belonging to House Pavus,' Maeris corrected, between gritted teeth.

'Slave who likes being a slave,' someone in the crowd shouted.

'Person who likes their standing in the world,' the man with the sharpened stick said, loudly and clearly; his Elvhen was accented, but flawless. Clearly terrified by the fact that all were speaking a language she did not understand, the young pregnant girl grasped Maeris' knees even tighter, threatening to topple her.

'We will speak of all,' Marguerite said, kneeling, and trying to look the girl in the eyes; the girl buried her face in Maeris' skirt, refusing the comfort. 'Tell her she is safe,' Marguerite asked Maeris.

'She ain't, tho,' Maeris said, dryly.

'I swear to you she will be,' Marguerite responded, rising to her feet. 'Your man…' she hesitantly followed, looking at the male elf. 'Your man can stay with her, if you wish. If she wishes.'

The crowd murmured when Maeris gently pried the young woman from herself and whispered comforting words in her ear; the smell of the predator did not abate, it merely became more poignant as the girl shakily stood and reluctantly distanced herself from her protector. Still, Abelas was pleased that the scene of his overly public failure had been defused, and the crowd that he had to nudge his way through was slowly thinning. He still dared not look to Samson, nor Marguerite, and thus missed the poignant glance that the Orlesian elf exchanged with someone in the dispersing mass.

All that Abelas cared for was that he got to hide from his own embarrassment behind the walls of what had once been Solas' chamber, and that Samson, Marguerite and Maeris, who belonged to House Pavus and the woman he hated so that the mere mention of her name rendered him blind and violent, were following.

'The young girl must have the child Shem not,' Marguerite said. Her voice was smooth and pleasant, but her words carried a sense of terrible finality.

Abelas swallowed dry, for he knew that the Orlesian elf was right, yet, he felt the scene was frighteningly reminiscent of a trial – he, Samson and Marguerite were sitting, in relative comfort, while Maeris was standing stiffly before them.

Nonetheless, the woman remained defiant, and Abelas found himself admiring her courage, especially since she'd dropped her ladle outside the door.

'I'll tell ya what,' Maeris said, curling her upper lip to reveal the crooked teeth of one who was still obviously well fed. 'I tell ya what now, 'cuz it was impossible to make me heard outside. The girl is not with Shem child by choice.'

'Then,' Marguerite reasoned, 'there is no reason for her to want to guard it.'

'Want to keep it,' Samson corrected, squirming in his seat; Marguerite shrugged.

'Le meme,' the Orlesian said.

'No, it ain't the same,' Maeris said, dryly; the fact that she, an owned implement, understood Orlesian made Abelas feel new depths of shame. 'You free folk do not get it, 'cuz you never had nuthing like it. There's good masters an' bad masters, an' bad masters sometimes bend pretty youn' things across a table or a fence, an' lift their skirts, an' take their meat stick to what they own.'

'Creators have mercy,' Samson whispered. 'We do get it, Maeris, least I do. The Shem did this to our women in alienages all the time. Take their meat sticks to where they ain't wanted. We don't kill the women for not crossing their legs tight enough, Abelas,' the large elf said, shaking his head. 'We wasn't doing that in Denerim. We oughta not do it here, brother.'

'No woman who does a child not want keeps it.' Marguerite said. 'My own…employer,' she said, with a telling smirk, 'mistook me for a resting place for his…oh, bien, stick would say hard, so I say not stick. Hasty spit of his limp slug was enough to quicken my belly. Knitting needle, I found most useful.'

Maeris nodded, with no hesitation. 'Ya chose how you want. But the girl wants the babe,' she said. 'Here, or in Tevinter, she ain't the one choosing on nuthin' but this. How bad it gets, how good it gets…the babe will have her, and she will have it. She'll have someone she loves an' the love of who she can count on…'

'It is a human child,' Abelas answered, shaking his head. 'It cannot be born in Arlathan. We all know this,' he said, dryly. 'Maeris,' he said, looking at her, 'you must understand... All crossing of human and elf results in human. A human in our midst can only lead to more humans.'

'So what ya want to do?' the Tevinter elf asked, frowning. 'The girl wants ta keep it, an' to my mind, she's too far along for the knitting needle anyway.'

'The child cannot be born here,' Abelas repeated; he bit his lower lip in frustration. 'It cannot remain here,' he added. 'Even if…' he followed, hesitantly thinking his way through the situation, 'I allow her to have it…'

'Who are you to allow? Our new master?' Maeris spat.

'Watch yourself,' Abelas said, coldly.

'Or wha'? Ya gonna hit me again?' the woman shot, in return.

'No, certainly not,' Marguerite reassuringly intervened. 'But, I have to say, you are far less grateful than we thought…'

'What to be grateful for?' the Tevinter asked, bitterly. 'All of y'all are here by choice – we ain't. D'ya think that girl out there would've come here, if she knew ya gonna try to yank her babe from her belly?'

She looked at the three in barely subdued anger.

'Y'all think you set us free, eh,' Maeris said. 'But what freedom is it, if we have no right to choose nuthin'?'

'You are not prisoners, Maeris,' Samson carefully said; the entire thing, Abelas thought, was making the Ferelden elf uneasy, and, the Sentinel admitted to himself, he was not fully comfortable either. This, he considered, must have been the eerie sensation he'd caught from the crowd.

'So, if we don't wanna be here, we can just go?' the Tevinter asked, angrily. 'Eh?'

The three exchanged an uncertain glance; Maeris' frown deepened.

'More than half o' my people,' she said, 'don't speak your language. 'An' you took us from the only lives we know – some of the folk will be grateful, yeah…But some ain't; we's not used to living in boats with wings, we're used to having roofs o'er our heads an' eating actual food…'

'…and serving the Shem,' Marguerite said, narrowing her eyes.

'Has nuthing to do,' Maeris answered. 'Work is work here or elsewhere – main point is ya just took us. Have ya no minds? Did ya even think how many of my folk have human children already? How many mothers and fathers you've taken from their kids? I get well enough you hate all the humans, but not all of us do…'

'So,' Abelas coldly interrupted, 'you resent being taken from a life of servitude…'

'I resent pretend choice,' the Tevinter curtly replied. 'Ya may think you done us Tevinters a solid. Ya haven't – whatever pecking order ya have goin' here, we are last, an' now, with that poor girl an' her babe, ya treating us no better then our masters would.'

'How many of yours think so?' Marguerite asked, slightly leaning forward.

'Enough to matter,' Maeris answered, in a low snarl.

Abelas sighed and shook his head. 'Freedom is easily learned,' he said, softly but decisively. 'You are right in many ways,' he conceded, 'but time will ease all.'

'The mothers' longing for their children will ease in time?' Maeris shot back; the Sentinel shook his head in sorrow, and did not speak the first words that came to mind, for had he done so…

How could he, Abelas thought, tell this woman that those who willingly chose to have Shem children were traitors to his, and many others' eyes? She would not understand it, no more than her mistress, the poisonous Lavellan did.

'To the matter on hand,' he forced himself to calmly say. 'I am sorry, but it has to be thus – there will be no humans in Arlathan.'

'Ya can't force the babe from the womb,' Samson shakily put in. 'It is unholy.'

'Do you think if she gives birth to it and then we throw it off a cliff or leave it for the wolves to find, it will be more easy?' Marguerite asked, arching an eyebrow.

'No,' the Ferelden elf said, an unmissable edge of anger in his voice. 'But…'

'Samson,' Abelas dryly said, 'enough. I am sorry,' he repeated, his glance shifting between the Ferelden elf and Maeris, 'but my decision on this is final. Maeris,' he willed himself to say, 'you will tell the girl…'

He did not get the chance to finish offering even the pretence of choice – the door to the chamber was thrown aside, and, for a heartbeat, Abelas was grateful for the reprieve; it was but a heartbeat. Dread set in next, for he recognised the man with the sharpened stick, just barely so, for now he too was bruised and beaten, his lips split and bloodied, his nose flattened. He lent Abelas and his makeshift court of three no attention, but shouted to Maeris, in slurred, barely understandable Tevene.

The woman's eyes went wide, and she stiffened in shock – the man grabbed her arm, and began pulling her towards the door, still shouting. There were tears streaming down his bruised face, Abelas saw. And they were not tears caused by pain of the body – no. They were tears of the heart. Maeris too began to tremble, and resisted his pull for a second longer; there was no rush to her steps when she followed, however. Only the weight of the world on her shoulders.

From the door, Maeris turned and beheld them in such sorrow and disgust that Abelas almost lowered his eyes in shame. Still, it was not to him that Maeris spoke.

'Ya said she would be safe,' the Tevinter elf said, looking to Marguerite alone. 'I see how much weight your oath carries.'

She spat on the ground, and turned to leave – Samson darted to his feet.

'Wait, please,' he spoke. 'What…what happened?'

'Have balls enough to see for yourself,' Maeris said, dryly; she left. With heavy steps and heavy hearts, Abelas and Samson followed, no more aware of themselves than if they'd been drifting spirits, and it was better so, for what their eyes saw, when they arrived was almost too much for the heart to bear.

It was the large Ferelden gladiator to come upon the scene first, and he stood petrified, hiding the horror from Abelas' view for a moment longer – they had no need to nudge their way through the crowd now; it easily parted. Gathering his courage, the Sentinel stepped up from behind Samson, and saw.

The bloodied skirt, listed above the waist. The parted legs. The limp, small body of the barely formed, round-eared babe half emerged, and strangled between them. The young woman's eyes, fixed, and glassy, and dead. The blood still flowing, turning dust to mud.

Women, in Tevinter cut clothes, down on their knees and weeping quietly. Men, in Tevinter cut clothes, eyes alight with rage. Maeris, white as wax, stiff as a statue.

'Unspeakable,' Samson breathed, his gaze fixed on the scene. 'Unspeakable…'

With the fury of a thousand rage demons, Abelas spun on himself, thinking to return to the chamber of what he now knew had been ill-judgement; thinking to find Marguerite there, thinking to tell her what had just happened. Thinking to tell her…

He needed not go back – she stood there, barely a foot behind him, her honey coloured eyes not rimmed with tears, her glance colder than ever.

'What have you done…' the Sentinel hissed.

'Hurried le inevitable,' Marguerite said, coolly. She beheld him in barely supressed superiority. 'Here we would have arrived anyway – longer the girl lived, the more tension grown. Plus rapide, my solution.'

'But for the mercy of heaven, Marguerite,' Abelas whispered, roughly grabbing the woman's arm, to turn her towards him, 'not like this! What did you have them do, stomp the child out of her? Sit on her belly?'

'Other choices were given; she took them not.' The woman replied. 'More fast, like this.'

Yes, Abelas numbly thought, faster indeed. But he looked about himself, and the mixed sense of the feelings of the gathered people returned with a vengeance; there were still those who exuded satisfaction, but they were far fewer. The gruesomeness of the scene, the fact that what had happened was easily discernible even to those who had not witnessed it...It was not only the Tevinters that beheld him in awe and sickened incredulity. Samson had yet to look away from the carnage, and all but the most hardened of the Dalish were truly struck – some would recover, some would perhaps come to understand, in time…

But now, as the former Tevinter slaves surrounded the young woman's body, hiding her and her unfortunate dead infant from view, Abelas knew, beyond doubt that whatever thin veneer of peace he had managed to maintain was now irrevocably broken; the lines that had existed all along, the lines that might have once been erased by time, had now been drawn thick for all to see.

He shook his head, and let his hand slip off Marguerite's arm; oddly, the woman insinuated her fingers between his, and her eyes gathered some warmth.

'You know all too well there was no other way,' she whispered. 'If we'd allowed the child to be born, it would have been much worse, and she would be dead regardless; no more can one make a woman have a child she wishes not for, than take from a woman a child she wishes – to cast her out anywhere near where she help might find would doom us all. A new-born babe, a mother who gives it breast – it would have swayed more hearts; when the time came to put them out…'

Abelas clenched his teeth.

'Perhaps, Marguerite,' he whispered, not taking his eyes of Maeris. 'But they will never forget this. Nor forgive it.'

'Then, she must be next, maybe.' The Orlesian said, dryly.

'That,' an unknown man said, in an even, hushed tone, 'would be most unwise.'

Abelas measured him from head to toe, and narrowed his eyes – the man's accent and the cut of his robes pointed to the fact that he too was of Tevinter, and that he was, undoubtedly, a mage. Whether a slave or not, however, was hard to discern; the man carried himself with a poise the others did not possess, and his dress was blatantly richer than that of the others.

'Your name?' the Sentinel asked.

'Flavius,' the other responded. 'Scribe to Archon Radonis.'

'Another who appreciated his station, then?' Marguerite asked, with an icy smile; Flavius looked at her with undisguised contempt – something, Abelas thought, that was, in itself, most unwise, given the fact that the Orlesian had just shown she wielded quite some power over her people.

'Non, chere mademoiselle,' he responded, calmly and clearly. 'One those who are here by choice. I could easily have resisted your rapture, and I strongly advise you do not attempt to send any of your…following my way, or Maeris' way; it would turn out unpleasant. For them.'

The woman smirked. 'You have not learned from your masters, then, that a rebellion without a head is not much of a rebellion, hm?' she asked.

'While you obviously don't grasp that a rebellion with a powerful symbol needs no head,' Flavius returned; he shifted slightly aside, and gracefully gestured towards the dead young woman. 'You have just given them one. The last thing you want to do is give them another, which is exactly what you will do if you attack Maeris.'

'You think the child Shem should have been born, Flavius, scribe to Radonis?' the Orlesian once more inquired, narrowing her eyes.

'No,' the man calmly replied. 'I simply think that pregnancy is a delicate state for a woman, and infants are not necessarily the sturdiest of creatures; women die in childbirth. Babes die in their cots. In other words,' he followed, turning his clear, green eyes to Abelas, 'there were ways in which this goal could have been accomplished without starting a war.'

'Spoken like a true Tevinter,' Abelas noted, dryly, yet, though he hated himself for it, he could find little to disagree with in what Flavius had said.

'Spoken like a man who has every reason to want us all to survive,' Flavius returned. 'What you have done here, mademoiselle,' he said, once more looking to Marguerite, 'is precisely what her master might have done once he learned of the girl's condition. Might not have been her master, might have been his honourable wife, but someone might have held that poor girl down and washed out her womb; she might have lived, she might not have. Those people gathered about her poignantly know this – it might have happened to them, or to one they love, and they would have been as powerless to stop it as they were now. You cannot teach people that they are not livestock if you treat them as if they were.'

Marguerite looked away, and bit her lower lip; there was a minute ripple of emotion in her eyes, but whether it was guilt, or the realisation that she had truly committed a great mistake, it was hard to discern.

'I still think the Maeris woman is dangerous,' she said, her voice lacking total conviction.

'No,' the Samson breathed, finally dragging himself to their side. 'If ya touch that woman I'll cut your throat myself, ya cruel, cruel Orlesian whore…'

'Enough,' Abelas tiredly said. 'Enough! Enough of this. Let them see to their dead,' he ordered, then spoke the words again, louder, when all eyes, even Tevinter eyes turned to him. Samson nodded, with tears in his eyes; Flavius gave him a short, approving nod.

Without waiting to see if he'd been obeyed, Abelas spun on himself and stalked away.

We will not survive here, the Sentinel dazedly thought. We will kill each other before the humans do.

1 May you learn. Considered one of the greatest Elvhen curses, even overtaking 'May the Dread Wolf take you.' Solas says it to Vivienne, and I could find words no more fitting.

Hello, hello - now, we hope, you can begin to see a truer and more complex villain than Solas ever was: the difficulties of governing.