Still round the corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate
And though I oft have passed them by
A day will come at last when I
Shall take the hidden paths that run
West of the Moon, East of the Sun.
She is dead.
Josephine cannot think; everything is falling about around her. It's so damnably cold and she cannot think.
She had let the Herald go. Behind them, when snow enveloped the town and the creature of the abyss took flight, she had made her peace with the Herald's death. She had embraced her sacrifice; she'd said to Leliana that this was a good thing. Something they could work with.
Words. Words, words that hadn't convinced the spymaster at all. Josie, trying to comprehend, trying to be like Leliana, so able to move on and reformulate. She could spin this, the Herald that had been born, lived, and served with the Inquisition, dying so that its survivors might get one last chance at redemption.
She spilled the narrative in stumbled words, unwilling to acknowledge the tears that streaked down her cheek as their entire procession froze and turned to the remainders of their home. The snow cascaded down, a thundering roar and unending tide of whiteness. Sheer whiteness. So unlike Ellana herself, olive skin, dark hair and dancing dark eyes.
"Like Andraste, she dies for our freedom." She is muttering the words, and Leliana simply puts a hand around her shoulders, letting her fool herself.
The Herald was dead to her then. Without the wings of that demon, no one could survive such a torrent of nature and cold.
Cassandra was broken by it.
"She told us to run." Varric and Dorian stood behind her. The other companions had been spread amongst the refugees. But at the collapse of the mountain, they filtered their way forward to stand with the advisors.
"Why'd you let her stay! She's the boss – what were you thinking!" The unkempt elf girl is splitting at the seams, anger in her face as she shoves at the Seeker's arm.
"She planned it like this, Buttercup." Even the dwarf can muster no lightness in this moment. He puts a hand out to try to calm Sera, but the elf swats him away.
Josephine looked at them. Cassandra, a dead emptiness in her eyes. Dorian, fists clench and face unreadable. She glanced at Cullen, and felt rage simmer in her stomach.
He knew. The Commander's eyes are on the snowy rubble of what used to be Haven. His expression is agony and regret. He let her do this.
Josephine does not get angry. Her training, first as an ambassador, and second as a bard, does not allow for it. Anger is unproductive and obliterates reason. It is unsuited for any pragmatic purpose in the agent; the truly effective negotiator will use her opponent's anger against them.
But in that moment, she wants to throttle the Commander and send him back in time to correct the tragedy that he'd allowed.
"The numbers support it, Josie." Leliana's words are muttered low, pitched only for her ears.
Josephine's anger gains a new target with the spymaster's whisper. The numbers? This was the Herald of Andraste, a young elven girl who'd believed in their cause. Trusted them when she had so repeatedly been wronged in the past.
She would have done it anyway. Perhaps that was what hurt the most. Josie knew what determination in the Herald looked like. Knew that if this had been her plan, no other outcome would have been possible. The Herald hadn't needed permission from any of them.
And so she'd made peace with the moment and followed Cullen's eyes out to observe the blanket of snow. Around them, blizzard winds whipped fiercely. She closed her eyes. The Herald was gone.
But then, the boy had spoken. The one with the misty eyes and fragmented thoughts. What was he – this awkward creature?
"She needs us." The boy appeared – where had he been standing? – urgency on his face. "She is cold. So cold."
Cullen grabs his shoulders.
"Speak sense!" He rattles Cole, and Cole lifts his own arms to the Commander's shoulders. "Does she live?"
"If you will save her, then maybe she lives."
Glances are exchanged among the crowd, and Josephine doesn't know what to think. Who to turn to.
"Josephine, Leliana. Find mother Giselle and continue leading the people." Cassandra is the one who finally speaks. None of them want to hope. Who is this boy, and how can he know anything? But Cassandra always was the most devout of them all.
"Cullen, you are with me." She strides forward into the snow. "Bring the boy."
And soon they are gone, engulfed by whiteness that threatens to swallow them all. When they return, Josephine cannot help the strangled cry that breaks out of her throat.
She is dead. So pale. Once sun-browned skin is now white. Eyes are closed and dark lashes do not flutter. Cullen's arms engulf her; her cheek is against his shoulder and the Commander's eyes on her face, heedless of the Seeker who walks before him, shouting orders. They are nowhere significant or defensible, a snowy channel between two mountains, but she orders them to halt. Tents are assembling quickly, the Chantry sisters moving among the refugees, soothing softly.
Mother Giselle walks up to Cullen, says something, stroking her Herald's face with one elegant hand. Josephine is frozen in place. She could accept it, Ellana's death, from afar. She could let her friend be buried beneath rubble and snow. But seeing her – her limbs dangling, her side a gory mess, her face bruised – seeing her was another beast entirely.
But then Cullen is following Mother Giselle with the deference of a lifelong Chantry boy. The woman is moving swiftly, calling out, beckoning Solas and Vivenne near. They disappear inside a tent together and Josephine is unsure. Takes a few tentative steps towards the tent.
"Ruffles," there is a voice at her side and she looks to see Varric. "They say that she's alive."
She meets the dwarf in the eyes and wonders why is telling her this. Was her disassembly so apparent? Why did the Herald matter so much, and why did Varric want to ease her worries?
Questions for a bard. For Leliana. Josephine just smiled and bent forward, wrapping her arms around the dwarf. He tensed – clearly he wasn't expecting the overt affection – but then he softened and returned the hug.
For a while, there is anxiety in the camp. The refugees and soldiers whisper reverentially, hovering around the Herald's tent. She died. She must've died. And yet she lives again? More words Josephine could work with. An even more enduring mythos, a story of sacrifice and resurrection.
What did she believe? She slipped inside the tent later in the evening, when things were certain. The Herald was naked from the waist up, breasts and abdomen wrapped in bandage. She has tossed to throw her blankets aside, it seemed, and her brow is furrowed as if she suffered an unpleasant dream. Bruises are scattered across her body and an angry welt spreads across her collarbone.
But there is warmth in her cheeks, and her hair is a distraught mess around her face, a silky brown on the drab grey of the cot. The pointed tip of her left ear peaks out from beneath a braid, and Josie's fingers itch to correct the tangles, to encourage them fall straight around her face. If Josie stares long enough, she swears she can see the pulse below her chin.
Cullen is at her side, seated, one of her small hands dwarfed in his own large ones. His gauntlets are off, Josephine notes, and he runs a thumb meditatively across the back of the Herald's palm. The fingers of his other hand trace her wrist, and it is only then that Josephine notices the dark mottled skin of a bruise that surrounds that limb. Someone had gripped that wrist – held it hard.
I cannot be angry with him, she thinks. Cullen has not turned to acknowledge her entrance. His gaze remains forward, on the Herald. He did what his position demands of him. Clearly, it has distraught him.
She kneels next to Cullen, puts a hand on his arm.
"You did the right thing, Commander."
Always gracious, he smiles softly at her. Cullen is a handsome man, though he hardly seems aware of it. Josephine wonders at his past – she has heard the stories, read the dossier. But apart from her superficial teasing – it was really just too easy with the Commander – she hardly knew him at all. But she understood that he was a man of duty and honour. She knew that the choice between the greater good and his friend would cripple him inside.
"I know," he says quietly, turning his amber eyes back to the Herald.
"Solas and Vivienne seem confident that she will make a full recovery." Why did she always end up in these roles? Reassuring, supporting. No – not always. Varric had, after all, offered her comfort earlier that day.
"I am glad of it." The Commander's strong fingers tightened around the Herald's hand, and Josephine eyed the movement, marveled at the contrast in size. Man and woman. Human and elf. Ellana was such a delicate thing. Her eyes followed the joined hands up, admiring the sleek lines of muscles, the rounded shoulders that betrayed Ellana's unexpected strength. Her bosom was generous, especially for an elf, and her torso curved in at the waist – a natural figure that many an Antivan woman would kill for.
But Ellana was nothing like those women, with their corsets and berets. Nothing like the ladies of Josephine's younger days. Her grace was born not from ballroom dancing but from a life on the streets, where fleet-footedness ensured that there was food to eat each night. Her figure was not accented, objectified to demonstrate that you were the perfect gift, but instead was hidden behind layers of leather. Loops and belts and secret dagger sheaths, pressed flat against smooth skin. Her beauty was accidental, not intentional, Josephine concluded, wishing that she was alone with the Herald so that she could test – could see if that skin was as soft as it looked.
Accidental beauty. She huffed. What a cliché. Just this morning, she'd applied her own eyeliner and shadow, curled her bangs just so. As if her fashion mattered in Haven. As if it had changed their fate when the Templars came.
Cullen stands then, softly putting the Herald's hand to rest on the cot. A man who sees everything as a nail. She'd said something like that to the Herald once, but wondered now if she'd been wrong. If gentleness could be coaxed out of the Commander. From the way his fingers slipped off her wrist, Josie suspect that the Herald had already done that coaxing.
Cullen nodded to her and left. Outside the tent, he heard Cassandra engage him, draw him into conversation with Leliana. The Seeker was like Cullen too – all decisive action and firm edicts, but softened by the Herald's charm.
How do you do this to all of us? Ellana's brow has relaxed now, and her face looks peaceful. If Josephine ignored the spreading bruises, the darkened splotch on her bandage, just below her breast, it would be easy to think the elf asleep.
She gives into her earlier urges and reaches out. Slides her fingers along a cheekbone, and then down her jawline. Elven bones are so delicate. Like brushstrokes. Josephine's finger curl against Ellana's neck, pressing gently, taking comfort in the slow but steady pulse beneath her fingers.
"Thank you for coming back to us, Ellana." The words are quiet in the stillness of the tent.
Outside, she can hear an argument beginning.
"Maker knows what we will do now," she mutters. Cullen is urging reconnaissance; he is almost yelling at Cassandra, insisting that they must search for a more defensible position. Leliana, oddly, insists that they need more rest, that the people have suffered too much to move on so soon.
Josephine sighs.
"You are lucky you sleep through this," she tells the unconscious elf. Ellana was especially good at not arguing. In the war room, she'd stand quietly why they lobbed suggestions and criticisms at each other. She seemed almost inattentive, at first, but Josie came to recognize her downcast gaze and still expression as thoughtfulness, not withdrawal.
Mentally, Josie was already preparing a list of nearby nobles they could appeal to. The others were foolish to think of staying or striking out blind; she knew her voice was needed in their discussion.
"I will see you later, Herald." She smiles at the woman and lays a gentle kiss on her forehead. Then, she is out of the tent and adding her voice to the fray. They argue for hours, but the words and points get repetitive, bitter, and insufficient. They reach a deadlock, and retreat inside themselves.
The next time she sees the Herald, Ellana is doing just what Josie remembered. Stepping into the argument, solving their problems in a way that none of the advisors expect.
Mother Giselle is the one who rescues them from their bitterness. Her smooth voice clearly surprises the Herald, who is on her feet and wrapped a loose shirt. At the sight of the elf and the start of the song, the townsfolk rise, step forward. Leliana's soprano joins in, and Cullen's full tenor.
The Herald stands before them all, visibly weak, but smiling. There is peace in the words the Chant, and the haunting sound of hundreds of voices rises up through the mountains, warming Josephine within.
She is their Herald, regardless of what she believes. And, after she disappears briefly with Solas, she returns with a solution so unbelievably attractive that none of them are able to reject it, despite the objections of their rational mind. A place in the mountains, an abandoned fortress.
The next morning, they begin to march. The Herald leads them through the wilderness. Josephine feels as though they are a part of a myth in the making.
And that's why she's shocked to discover the Herald, that evening, huddled a way on the outskirts of the camp they've made. She'd torn herself away from her companions, from the townsfolk who asked for her blessing, and sat in the shadow of a large rock. Curled in on herself. Knees up. Confidence gone. Her face is open and afraid; nothing like the ready leadership she'd displayed all day.
"I have been looking for you, Herald."
"I know you all have questions." That expression, the terror in her eyes – it's gone. She's replaced it. That neutral mask slides into place and Josephine knows that the Herald does not want to be seen like this.
I have made her afraid to be seen like this, Josie realizes. All my lectures on image and reputation. I have not left her with time to grieve.
They had lost dozens in Haven. Friends and allies. Entire families. The Herald had witnessed that destruction and then faced down an enemy none of them could envision.
"We need to know what happened," she said gently. The advisors had sent her to find the Herald, assuming, probably correctly, that she was the softest of them all. The one the Herald liked best. Josie felt a little like a traitor as she forced her friend to share, to speak words she so obviously did not want to face.
"I know," Ellana says, staring off into the darkness.
Josephine eyes the snow around the elf with a little distaste. She pulls her cloak close and goes for it – she sits in the snow next to the Herald, leaning back against the large rock.
"I don't know how you can sit there in only your armour." She says through chattering teeth. "This Ferelden weather is almost as barbaric as this nation's people."
Ellana barks a laugh.
"I didn't know you could be mean, Josephine." The elf smiles at her, and Josie is glad to see the expression on her face.
"I grew up in the woods around the Free Marches. Ferelden winters are nothing." Ellana's words are belied by the way her hands rub along her triceps; warmth is something they are all coveting.
They are silent for a time and the wind blows. Between the trees and in the mountains, it is howling. Almost a living thing.
"This keep of yours. I know nothing of it. It is on no maps that I have studied."
"It will be there. I trust Solas." Ellana is looking into the night again. Josie wonders at the greenness of her eyes.
"How can you trust at all, Ellana?" She spoke without thinking. What was it about this elf that undid all of her training?
Ellana turns to study her face.
"Why shouldn't I?"
No going back now, Josie. You might as well ask. Her mind has been slower, since the avalanche buried Haven. As if it needed more time, more space, to catch up to the rapid fire way that everything around them changed.
"Because every time you do you've been hurt. Leliana's report said that your father took you to Kirkwall without explaining that you were leaving your clan forever."
Ellana nods, but doesn't say anything. Again, her gaze has slipped away. The elf seems unfocused, as if afloat within herself. Attending, but not really present in the conversation.
Unwittingly, Josie sidles up to her, pressing her side into the elf's – Ellana wants the warmth, she tells herself.
"And then the woman you worked for – the smuggling queen. The report says she betrayed you, sold your father to a blood mage. Allowed his murder."
Ellana shrugs. "I never learned exactly what role Athenril had to play in my father's death. Maybe I should've sought her out."
She is playing with something, between her fingers. A wooden token. A crescent moon. Something decidedly elvish, Josephine thinks. Try as she might, Ellana cannot deny what she has been born.
"And when your lover betrayed you?"
Ellana's gaze is arrested then, snaps to Josephine's face.
"What do you know about that?"
Josie leans away slightly, taken aback by the Herald's sudden intensity. She raises her hands disarmingly.
"Only what Leliana reported. She said that he betrayed you and that you left Kirkwall as a result."
Ellana meets her gaze, holds it, eyes intense as if judging Josephine. Scanning her for what? Honesty? The whole encounter felt wrong; Josie chastised herself. She never should have said anything.
When the Herald finally speaks, it is quick and decisive. Her voice is flat.
"He sold me out to a man who imprisoned me for months and repeatedly raped me."
The Herald stands and is walking away. Josephine is frozen in place, the weight of the words immobilizing her.
What?
Leliana knew. Cassandra knew. They must – she must have written something, anything, in her journal at some point. Why hadn't they written as much in the report on the elf? Josephine stands, stares after Ellana's retreating figure. So small, curled in on herself against the darkness.
What right did Josie have to know, really?
She had never suffered trauma like that. She looked down at her hands. Her nails were caked in dirt and a bruise formed over her wrist and along the side of her palm from where she'd been struck by debris during the collapse of Haven. This was hardship for Josie; her sisters would be appalled to see her skin in such a condition. The one time she'd killed another human being – that was her trauma.
And yet Ellana was their Herald. A victim of something so unspeakable Josie couldn't think straight. A pawn in their maneuverings – the only one amongst them who'd had almost no choice in joining the Inquisition. A tool they routinely deployed to kill, to sunder and seal rifts as needs demanded.
"Ellana, wait!" Finally, her feet respond to what her heart knew she was supposed to being doing. She caught up to the Herald outside the command tent. Inside, Cullen and Cassandra's voices were raised in disagreement.
"Ellana," she reaches out and grabs the Herald. It starts as a touch on her shoulder but then she is pulling the woman into a hug, full-bodied and fierce.
"I'm so, so sorry."
Ellana is startled, tense at first before she relaxes into Josephine, returning the hug gently.
"So am I." Her voice is small, whispered into Josephine's neck. They stand for moments, and Josephine for once is heedless of the eyes around them, the soldiers who stand and watch, the refugees who stroll by with curiosity in their faces.
"Josie," The elf is hesitant when she speaks again. "Are you crying?"
Josephine is crying, sniffling and unable to hold back tears. All the things she cannot do for Ellana. The Herald is goodno matter what Leliana suspects or Cullen fears. She does not deserve the past she has endured or the future that they are giving her.
"I'm sorry."
"You said that already." From her muffled words and broken voice, Josie thinks that the elf might be crying too.
"I'm sorry I can't do anything to help." The Antivan woman sniffs, an undignified sound, but she no longer cares. "I'm sorry I can't make any of this easier for you." Her voice – what would her trainers in Antiva say if they could see her now? An Ambassador's greatest asset is her detachment – her ability to work within the emotions of others, but never succumb to her own.
"I know. It's alright, Josie." The Herald lets her go, pulls her away with gentle, but insistent, arms on Josephine's biceps.
"I… uh," the Herald looks down. For once, she is unable to hold Josie's gaze. "I've never told anyone. Out loud, that is. Leliana and Cassandra know because they read my journals. But I've never said the words."
"You're doing it again." She and the Herald are almost the same height. Josie hadn't noticed until that moment. The Herald always felt bigger than her small size – she could fill a room with her presence, if she wanted to. "You're trusting. Even though you of all people should struggle with that."
Ellana smiles.
"Some people make the decision to trust easy, Josie."
The elf's hands slide down her arms. She takes Josephine's hands. Snow falls around them, lightly now. The wind has died down at last.
"Come on." Ellana is still smiling. "I feel better. Let's go debrief this debacle."
Ellana turns, releases the Ambassador's hands and walks over and into the Command tent. But Josephine cannot follow right away. She is floored by the emotion of the exchange, and she feels almost unworthy of the words Ellana spoke.
She sighs, takes a deep breath of the frigid air and turns her gaze to the sky.
Maker watch us all. Bless us all, but especially bless her.
She squares her shoulders and follows Ellana into the tent.