She had, of course, heard stories of Minrathous.
Fenris in his cups called it a roiling place, dead with the magic baked in its limestone city walls. He had said that the ordinary people inched along the edges of the streets, of their own lives, keeping the way clear for litters and divans and the processions of magisters and their guards and their slaves. Those men who were cowards, who hid even from the day itself. Who wielded in their cowardice all the power of the old Imperium.
"You can taste them in the water," he'd said once, in the dark place between a joke and a reminisce. "And everyone else. It's bitter. Poisoned."
Jona hadn't liked the elf at all then, though she trusted him, and trust meant family more as much as blood ever did. She'd placed a glass of boiled Kirkwall water by his bedside when she left him for the evening.
Anders put all of his poetry into spinning yarns of a place he'd never seen, never been, of stories printed in books in a language he couldn't, didn't read. Didn't read well, he'd corrected at the time. "They teach you Tevene in the Circle, but it never stuck with me. I might have gotten out sooner if I paid more attention to it. Tevinter spells are stronger than most of ours."
When they arrived, was neither a white city nor a black one, but as with all the things she did somewhere in-between. It was choked with the dust of yellow mortar and crumbling cement and men and women buying and selling and tearing down and building on top of the ruin left behind by their forebears.
The thrown-open gate reminded her of Kirkwall, and not-Kirkwall; they reminded her of the low stone barricade around most of Lothering, the harbor chain protecting Gwaren from attack by sea.
"How much Tevene do you actually know?" she asked Anders, then, as she craned her neck and took in a sliver of the gate.
"More than you, less than me," Bethany replied in that language.
"I believe she just said she's a wretched show-off," Anders said with fondness.
"You wouldn't have me any other way."
"No one ever smacked her for being pert as a child, did they?"
"Not Bethany," Hawke said. "She got talkings-to."
The crowd shoved them forward. As good a reason as any to get moving.
Hawke sheathed her sword and settled her shield at her back. She sauntered in with Bethany at her right hand and Anders at her left, and the world did not rumble beneath them. The gate attendant only noted something about from whence they'd come.
After he spoke, Bethany repeated his words, "He said we sound like Kirkwall, and that they've had too many of those the last month or so. But he'll put down Ostwick if we're certain we're telling the truth."
"We're certain," Hawke said. Smiled. Nodded. Pulled open the strings of her purse.
She knew this routine. She'd played his part in this routine before.
The portage fees were listed up on a sign above this petty bureaucrat's head, in Tevene and the common tongue below, with hashes and painted coins to the side for the illiterate. The man adjusted his draping garment on one shoulder. His fingers buzzed with magic when she touched him, sliding a stack of coins across the table between them. She placed two sovereigns at the bottom, which disappeared.
"Ostwick," the porter said, in a round, sonorous accent Hawke wouldn't stay long enough to get used to. He gave them back a smile and a nod and a wave into the city.
No one else remarked upon their entry.
"'Sounding like Kirkwallers' was not all he said," Anders murmured as they passed.
"I am not translating all he said," Bethany replied.
There was a time when the Champion of Kirkwall could have traded on her name.
Maybe she still could have, here as she didn't dare try in the Free Marches.
Maybe killing the Arishok still counted for something here. Maybe it counted for more than picking up the hourglass that had been the Templar order, and hurling it against the wall rather than flip it over for another round.
Maybe that meant more here than it had back home.
You couldn't tell slave from freeman most times. Few wore iron collars or iron shackles, but when you went to meet a man's eyes not all of them would. Fewer of those had been draped with precious stones and metals, dressed up in finely- woven, clean linen. Those walked close to the men who owned them like ornamented pets, and those men dressed in silk and stank of perfume and volatile oils.
"I say we find a room in the shitty part of town," Hawke said.
The shitty part of town, it turned out, was situated in the northernmost part of the city. The containing wall arced inland, away from the sea. The sewage that had been collected from throughout Minrathous was hauled out into the fields surrounding it through the northern gate. The Imperial Highway veered around those fields, rather than cutting through them. You could get a bed and a door that closed for ten silver a night outside the wall and twenty inside it.
Hawke paid a sovereign for a bath, a door that locked and the innkeeper's discretion.
"You two could stay," Bethany said that night, over wine and a dish of dumplings in a squid-ink sauce.
They'd taken a corner table in the taproom, close to the back door with a view of all the other entrances and exits. Hawke shuffled a deck of cards but never dealt, debating whether they'd replenish their coffers faster running a confidence game or doing honest work. Or as honest as any of the work they ever did.
Anders rested one hand on her knee beneath the table, watching the other patrons with eyes blazing fade-blue beneath their usual ruddy hazel.
So many folk carried a mage's staff openly here.
One woman had hung hers with pouches, tiny ones, bigger ones, ones the size of the pomelos sold in the green market. She produced a coin from one and a set of cutlery from another and dug in to her supper with enthusiasm. A man near the door took his son by the back of the neck and steered him in a straight line up the stairs, on the opposite side of the room from Hawke's table. The lad's sister played with the glowing illusion of a string-game between her fingers, following behind them without seeing where she put her feet.
Jona stabbed a dumpling off Bethany's plate with the tip of her knife; she'd had bread and cheese and olives herself. Too hot to eat hot food when they'd come down.
"We could build a life here," Anders said.
He sounded hopeful, for the first time since they'd left Kirkwall. Like he believed in the possibility of a world that didn't want him in a cage. The air changed, a tiny cell around their table; static raised the hair on Jona's arms and sent a frisson down her spine.
Bethany finished her wine and took Jona's glass.
"This is the first place they'll come looking for us," Jona said.
"And the Chantry will find the fight of their lifetime waiting if they do."
Nobody seemed to notice the ragged edge on his voice, the light in his eyes, beneath his nails, in the lines that framed his mouth. Jona took Anders' hand and squeezed, twined their fingers, stroked the pad of her thumb up and down the length of his.
She didn't shush.
"We'll fight if we have to," she said. "But I'd sooner run that fight. Though we do need to stay a while and earn a bit of money, if nothing else. Everything you've said about the Anderfels makes me think opportunities aren't exactly thick on the ground where we're going."
He calmed, not entirely but enough, and she wondered whether it was too late to turn around and find a little valley in Rivain, instead.
It was like that first year all over again—they found the least-shifty-looking smugglers in a twelve-block radius, and Jona sold them them her sword. Lyrium wasn't controlled by the Chantry here; mages walked the streets, muttering lists and tasks and place-names like ordinary people, and almost every one had a glowing blue flask or seven clipped to their belt.
No, the lyrium was not controlled by the Chantry, but it was inspected and taxed by the city, and kept almost entirely out of laymen's hands.
And with the city looking for its cut, came the businessmen looking to dodge the city, came the customers looking to buy just a little cheaper, came the need for guards and transport and all the shadow-cloaked bureaucracy that sprang up with employ for the likes of Jona Hawke and hers.
Her boss this time around was a man named Iulius, who offered to slake her thirst with a cup of the blue her first night.
"All my apologies, Lord, but I know how this goes. You drink one day; you're sick for two. You use the stuff for a month and you're in bed wishing your insides would boil away for a season. I've been there. I'd as soon not go back."
Thrask had taught her a few of his Templar tricks, and she hadn't used them since the Arishok. The weeks afterward, when Kirkwall had burned and kept burning, when you couldn't buy or steal a Lyrium flask to save yourself, those were easily the worst weeks of her life.
Iulius shrugged. Muttered that it was her loss, and settled a battered helm on his head.
He was a puffy, sun-browned sort of man, with round deep-set eyes and hands that could crush your bones if you let him get ahold of them. Big. Older and slower than he would've been in years past, but wilier than you. He'd come from the very southern end of Tevinter, and he spoke Orlesian and the common tongue as well he did Tevene, and that first night he paid her very well for roughing up a couple of idiots who thought it was a good plan to sell their wares in his boss's territory.
After a particularly successful round a few weeks later, he'd taken her home to meet his wife and family. He liked her, and she liked being liked—liked having people, finding them, gathering them close around her. Jona took his youngest boy on her lap and tried explaining how to say her name for half an hour, his siblings and mother giggling the entire time. Iona, Yona, Dona; he never quite got the first sound, and it was well past his bedtime when she strolled back home.
He was a very nice child; they all were. And Flavia was a very kind woman, who spoke to Jona in the language of bread and salt, where they shared no words at all.
We could make a home here.
Some nights Jona sat awake by the fire and wrote home, wrote to Varric or Aveline or Fenris, the words scrawled out before her, I have done things I regret. I've come to a place I swore I'd never revisit. She shredded the paper each time and used it for kindling.
Anders found her like that after they'd been in Minrathous three months.
They'd taken a second room at the inn, and he'd started seeing patients there. This time he charged for his skill. Men and women who needed patching up but didn't want their spouses to know what they'd been up to paid, as so many people did, for service with a politely-turned head. Bethany found work in a forge, center-city. It was faster for a mage to heat the iron rods destined for nails or horseshoes than a boy with a bellows, and you could spell them for long wear and strength while you worked. All told, Jona could be in or out at any give hour, lazing in the taproom or knocked unconscious in her bed at noon or midnight. It all depended what time Iulius came calling for her.
There wasn't a last call so much as the hour where the barman locked the liquor away and went to bed, usually a bit before dawn. He shouted, I'm going to sleep!, and his warning echoed against the mostly-empty room in the two languages he spoke. Jona regarded her cup, thick beer warmed to the ambient, sticky-damp temperature of the room and almost gone, and she tossed the dregs back with a grimace. Not the ratpiss ale at the Hanged Man. A few degrees better in fact, but.
"It's not the ratpiss ale at the Hanged Man," she murmured for her own ears.
Anders found her with half a letter crumpled between her fingers and her eyes on the grainy-bottom of that empty cup. He dropped a many-times-folded broadsheet on the table in front of her.
Their table. Their people sitting 'round it, and not-their-people moving when they realized it had long been claimed. Sometimes Jona brought Iulius; sometimes Bethany dragged one of the smiths home with her before disappearing Maker-knew- where; Anders had never yet returned from the room that served as his clinic with a hanger-on. He scarcely left this building.
Jona unfolded the sheet, tearing it down the middle accidentally. She lined the text up again as best she could, though she couldn't read more than a road sign and didn't understand nine spoken words of ten.
Some Minrathan lunatic had figured out moving type, and another one how to make paper thin as silk and a thousand times more flimsy. The business of distributing the news had sprung up less than twenty years ago, and nobody was, from what she gathered, quite sure how it might yet change the worlds of business, of magic, of faith.
A slapdash engraving of her face, and another of his in profile, took up a quarter page beside a fierce-looking block- print headline. The words beneath bent and blurred with aging metal type; a poorer paper, then. A paper that meant to make its fortune writing about the hill she would on.
He took a steadying breath and splayed his fingers, stretching the webbing taut between each one, as he often did in silent argument with the spirit camped out in his flesh. Jona touched the broadsheet, and wished her sister were here now. But Bethany had dug her fingers into life here, building up her own world as Hawke had done in Kirkwall, and she kept some of her people to herself.
Even without Bethany, she knew the word for Kirkwall, and she knew the word for war, and she knew how an artist could make his living instilling the fear of those who might destroy in those around him.
Jona Hawke's own picture glared back at her, ripped through the forehead, and angry.
Anders dropped into the seat beside her, and said, "We have a problem."