Cullen was keeping himself busy with troop dispositions, supplies distribution, demon clearouts... It was odd to be liaising with Hawke, all this time after the battle at the Gallows, about moving out the surviving Grey Wardens. But it was more than tolerable. In fact, if he was honest with himself, even reviewing the casualty lists was better than dwelling on that period the night before, the one his mind treacherously slunk back to whenever he stopped. The mercifully short period when he'd actually had to wonder which story was worse – that the Inquisitor was buried beneath tons of rubble, or that she'd escaped into the Fade. Either way, her chances of survival had seemed minimal; but with battle raging, it had been relatively easy to mutter a quick prayer and turn his mind to more immediate concerns, ones he could actually do something about. Funny that he should feel so much worse about it now that he knew she had made it out, mostly unscathed. While he was working, he didn't have to think about it... or listen to the little voice in the back of his head insisting that lyrium would make him feel so much better.

The last time the voice had been so loud, it had been the day Cassandra had told him that Themis had finally opened up about the fate of the Ostwick delegation. He'd needed to go off alone and pray for a while to get himself under control. He'd felt rather bad that he couldn't bring himself to get emotional about the other dead – good people, no doubt, but he'd never met them, or would recognise any of their names aside from the First Enchanter's. But the thought of her – imprisoned, frightened, used to make somebody a little money. That was the one he found hard to bear; only there was worse. He wasn't naïve. He knew what they might have done, if they'd kept her for any length of time, and that thought made him want to break things. Want to stab someone.

Want to drink lyrium, just to get it to stop.

But that would have dulled the good feelings too. It was all mixed together. And Themis wouldn't have liked it. So as soon as he made it back to some kind of equilibrium, he'd gone to her instead, told her... part of what was bothering him. It had made him feel better, and she said she liked that he could talk to her. He was fairly sure that was how these things were supposed to work.

He wondered who the two runaways were, who had helped her. One way or another, they were surely dead now. Was it their remains she'd found in the mountains that day? That would explain a lot.

He eyed the scorched and shattered siege engine. It wasn't worth the effort of repairing, just to drag it back across the Approach. "Break it up. Salvage the metal parts as far as possible and get the wood over to the pyres."

"Yes, Commander." Corporal Dun was sporting a beautiful black eye and her nose was freshly broken, but by soldiering standards she didn't even qualify as walking wounded.

Cullen turned to the youngster hovering at her elbow. "Go and tell the quartermaster we need a few axes here. And a cart, if there's one to spare."

"Yes, ser!" He disappeared with alacrity into the masses encamped around Adamant, working, eating, recovering, resting in whatever shade they could find. There was still a fair bit to be had, but as the sun climbed towards noon...

"Make sure you don't push yourselves too hard," he said. "I'd rather have a little waste than more people down with heatstroke."

"Understood, ser."

He'd do well to practise what he preached, he reflected as he moved along. It hadn't taken him long to realise that, in the pitiless sun of the Approach, metal armour and a big furry mane were tempting fate. Accordingly, he'd surrendered - no, performed a strategic withdrawal - and taken to wearing a lighter tabard once the day's heat was on. It was time he changed.

On the way back to his quarters, he resisted the temptation to take a route that circled away from the hospital tent. Its occupants had been harmed on his watch and he wasn't going to spare himself the sight and sound – even if passing by didn't do them any actual good, they deserved him not to avoid them either. Sometimes he would even wonder whether he had any business judging blood mages, when he was up to his armpits in the blood of the young men and women who came and laid themselves on his battlefield altars; all to give the Inquisition the power to fend off horrors for another year... another five years, ten... maybe.

Then he would kick himself and get back to work.

A familiar voice reached his ears. A luckless Grey Warden had offended Hawke somehow and was receiving one of her sarcastic tongue-lashings. Cullen could sympathise. Now there was a mage who damned well knew it when she was angry - and everybody else did, too.

It had been something to see, them clearing the battlements; Hawke's firestorms playing havoc among the enemy rank and file, Themis' more focussed blasts taking out the ones who survived, Dorian backing them up where the women's love of fire proved insufficiently destructive. Three mages on the front line against the darkness, and only one had had a Chantry-approved upbringing.

Food for thought, if one was inclined to think. Would Hawke, shut in a Circle as a child, have adapted; or would she have destroyed herself and all around her, thrashing against the confinement? Certainly she would never have become the force of nature she was, and he found himself regretting the thought of something beautiful and terrible being thus lost to the world.

It was good that no Circle had ever taken her in as an adult. She'd have been escaped, dead or Tranquil before the year was out; that, or not one stone of the place left on top of another.

So what about Themis, he wondered as he crossed into the area where the leaders' tents were pitched. What might she have become, if she hadn't learned repression and self-loathing as a child? Hawke's temper was the stuff of legends, but controlled, channelled, her outbursts precisely calibrated and targeted. All a rage demon could expect from her was a witty retort and a smack on the nose. Themis... was still figuring out what to do with her anger. Not the petty day-to-day annoyances, but the savage fury that had been building inside her for so many years. After it first appeared, she'd hidden it away again – from everybody else, at least, but she could no longer hide it from herself. One day just before they'd left Skyhold, the two of them had been together when what he'd thought was a comfortable silence had been broken by her harsh, furious sobs. Then he'd infuriated her further by assuming he'd done something wrong. Truthfully, he still didn't understand what the problem had been. She hadn't made much sense when she'd tried to explain it, and had quickly given up, burying her face in his chest.

So far as he knew, she hadn't exploded in front of anybody else; but it was worrying.

Speaking of worrying – who was that, ducking into the Inquisitor and Cassandra's tent? A woman in a plain blue dress and headscarf, not either of the occupants. There were guards in this area of the camp, but the security was largely illusory. It was difficult to properly guard a bunch of tents. He knew everyone who could walk into that tent uninvited, and that hadn't been any of them.

Hand barely touching his sword-hilt, he strode up to the tent, pulled aside the flap and was greeted with a startled yelp. "Born in a barn, were we?"

Themis was wearing her silk shirt and trousers, standing over her trunk with the scarf and dress in hand. Cullen noticed a chain around her neck, a silver coin set into a delicate obsidian frame.

"Yes, actually. I was early, caught Mother by surprise... Why were you dressed like that?"

She shrugged and dropped the clothes into the chest. "A trick the Iron Bull taught me. If I dress plain, cover my hair and keep my mouth shut so that the Ostwick accent doesn't show, not many people know my face well enough to realise who I am. Useful when I need to get outside, but don't feel up to being Inquisitorial."

"Wandering around in disguise? That's not safe."

"As opposed to the things I normally get up to?" She turned away to pick up her nugskin jerkin from the bed.

"Fair point. Speaking of which... you had an eventful night. More than most of us. How are you?"

Cullen couldn't see her face, but the shudder was obvious. When he slid his arms around her waist she turned and somehow managed to snuggle despite his breastplate, the jerkin falling forgotten to the ground. He embraced her as best he could, arms feeling clumsy in their metal protection.

"It was... bad," she said. "But, you know, it could have been worse. I don't know whether it was spreading itself too thin, or if it just didn't have much imagination, but it was so... superficial. It didn't seem like it was getting to our deep, dark fears, just the ones anybody could have guessed at – though I'm a bit puzzled about what it said to Blackwall."

"What?"

"That he was nothing like a Grey Warden. I don't know why he'd feel that way... unless it's that he didn't pick up on the Calling for some reason. Needling Dorian about his father, Hawke about failing her family... and it barely bothered with me. It's just..."

"Just what?"

"I can't stop thinking about what might have happened. If we hadn't got out so quickly. And bad enough my control over my anger is so... questionable. If I'd gone in there with it still buried and festering, controlling me without me even realising it..."

"Controlling you?"

She stepped away and retrieved the jerkin. "Yes. I've been giving it a lot of thought lately, and some of the things I've done make so much more sense now. Cutting off my hair, for starters."

"Cutting off...?"

"Oh, yes." Turning her back, she touched her spine just above the waist. "When I left the Ostwick Circle, it was down to here. Then there was me carrying on to the Conclave even though it made me sort of a fugitive."

"Sort of a fugitive? This I have to hear."

Themis chuckled, pulling on her Inquisitor garb. "It's like this. First of all, the Knight-Commander and First Enchanter did their best to keep things as close to normal as possible. I won't fault them for it, I think it helped. All the usual rules stayed in place, and we mostly maintained the polite fiction that they meant very much when if any mage made it out of the Ostwick area, the chances of them being brought back were essentially none.

"So anyway, Knight-Commander Sonnilon was against there being an Ostwick delegation at all – thought it was too dangerous. Fancy that. It was First Enchanter Vipascit who pushed for it, and she died in the ambush. When I found myself the last surviving member of the delegation, running around with two mages who definitely did not have leave to be out... it got complicated. I knew that, his worries having been proven correct, the Knight-Commander would revoke my permission to go. So my only way to make it to the Conclave was to get away from Ostwick without him getting the chance. When one of the local templars... exceeded his authority, I had to run and hide."

"So you stayed within the letter of the law but not the spirit. I see what you mean – that doesn't seem like you."

"I'll take that as a compliment. It would have been so much safer and less unpleasant to turn around and go home like everybody wanted me to - including my new travelling companions, I might add. If you'd asked me at the time, I'd have had all kinds of good reasons - duty, responsibility, honouring the First Enchanter's wishes - but underneath it there was this... feeling. That I deserved better. That a lot of people deserved better. That the Circles were being run by a bunch of self-righteous religious zealots and were much better at shutting us away out of sight than at protecting anybody. That templars were corruptible too, and what gave them the right to lord it over us. Oh, I could go on and on, but the point is this.

"I think that feeling had been there a very long time. I'd ignored it because thinking such thoughts would mean I was bad and corrupt - and never mind that plenty of arrow-straight mages said those things openly, logic doesn't come into this."

Cullen murmured, "Fear and reason. Not a great team."

"Exactly. And then, I venture outside the walls and between Ser Glad-He's-Dead Ricklen and my charming family, before the day's out I get my nose rubbed twice in the idea that the problem is not me, or my magic. The problem is the selfish bastards and the fine upstanding citizens who think they get to treat me like dirt. Because I'm a mage." Pulling her gloves on, she flexed her fingers as if wishing there was somebody's neck between them. "And suddenly that feeling isn't so buried any more, and there's this scream that's looking for a voice, and I'm striking out through all sorts of danger because deep down I want to scream it where someone might actually listen, where it might actually change something... and here we are."

"Here we are."

Finished dressing, she tugged herself into order and slipped back into his arms. "But listen to me prattling on about things past. You had quite the night yourself. How are you?"

He took a breath to consider. "Well. We captured a defended castle, which the Inquisition has never done before, no disrespect to your clearing those bandits out of Caer Bronach. I've never done it before. Casualties are at the lower end of our estimates. The clear-up is going smoothly. I'm feeling quite proud of everybody."

"Yourself included?"

"Maybe just a little."

"I should think so, too."

"Thank you. Themis, can I ask you something?"

"Of course."

"We haven't had a chance to talk about... before we left, when you got upset. Can you tell me now what was going on?"

She rested her head on his shoulder. "I just... let my mind wander. It seems it's not ready to be let out on its own just yet. I started thinking about us, about where we were going, and it dawned on me that I'd been assuming, sooner or later, you'd come to your senses."

"What does that mean?"

"That you'd leave me. That you'd finally realise a relationship between us was insane."

"What?" He took hold of her shoulders and stepped back so that he could see her face, this woman – this mage – he'd unexpectedly, impossibly come to love. He could see how it might look a bit crazy from the outside, but surely... "You can't actually..."

Her face twisted with frustration. Her eyes were dry but resolutely directed past his right ear. "No. I don't think that. Not... in any way that matters. There's just this voice inside me, and sometimes I don't realise I'm listening to it."

"It tells you mages are bad?"

"Yes, among other things," she answered with obvious relief. "It tells me the idea of loving me is supposed to disgust you, and there will come a time when you'll get past my corrupt magical charms and remember that. And then I catch myself, and I remember that these thoughts were put there, and I'm sure the people who did it honestly believed those things, but..."

"But it was about controlling you, too."

"Yes."

"Not that either one's any better, really."

He pulled her close again and held tight, the first time he'd had a chance to since the battle, his own anger and shame churning in his chest and tying his tongue.

Her arms slipped around his neck and she buried her face in the fur he was still wearing. Sometimes there was no need to say anything.

It was an effort of will not to crush her, to lock his arms around this beautiful, fierce, impossible woman and refuse to let go. In the scant few hours of sleep he'd snatched after the battle, he'd dreamed of Halamshiral, of those perfect few minutes they'd had to themselves on the balcony. Only this time she'd dissolved like smoke in his embrace, and the demons had laughed at him for imagining it possible that a woman like her would ever let him hold her.

And she, who had been pre-emptively locked away and never had the chance to commit any of the wrongs on his conscience, thought deep down that she should disgust him.

She pulled free and asked, "How do I look?"

"Achingly beautiful."

"Really? And where is this ache, exactly?"

Summoning up his dignity, he ignored the innuendo and put his hand on his chest. "Right here."

"Well, I'll just have to see what I can do about that. But for now, duty calls."

"It always does. One last thing." He took her face in his hands and pressed his lips to hers.