It took Hawke the better part of a week to test the first batch of magebane potion. It was a process Fenris had absolutely no desire to witness again.

Though Hawke had warned him more than once—warned him to the point her warnings had grown tiresome—the magebane's effects on her would be unpleasant, Fenris considered himself more than capable of the task. He was, after all, no stranger to unpleasantness. He was also perfectly aware of the reasons why magebane was outlawed in the Imperium, even if he didn't particularly care about those reasons, and had made use of the poison himself from time to time—when the occasion afforded itself—from the moment Danarius had first sent hunters after him. As efficient as bullets were, they were far more effective against mages—mages who could heal themselves with a thought—when dipped in magebane. The poison was not an easy one to acquire, but proved useful those times he'd acquired it.

He knew what it did, and yet.

And yet, from the moment Hawke first tilted the bottle to her lips and took that first swallow, Fenris found he could not remain detached and sanguine and simply watch as Hawke's condition deteriorated, second by second by second. He drew no satisfaction—mage or no—from the sounds of her retching, or of the sight of her too weak to stand.

But she had asked his assistance, and he had promised to give it.

The second trial left Hawke worse than the first, leaving a cold clamminess upon her skin lasting two full days and the night in between. But the third—the third trial left her only queasy and, though ill, but not violently so. The third potion still left her unsteady on her feet, but in no danger of losing her footing entirely.

The third potion left Hawke looking—despite the sickly tinge to her cheeks—optimistic. He'd given her lyrium potion and had again assisted her to her bed, leaving her to rest while the poison cycled itself through her system, but there was no doubt whatsoever about it: she was moving closer to possessing a tincture to quiet her magic, rendering her all but undetectable.

The next morning Fenris found Hawke hunched over her workbench. The lantern was still lit, though the hour was well past dawn and pale shafts of light filtered through the open hatch as the soft, faraway clucks of chickens rippled the early-morning peace. A cup of tea sat nearly forgotten by her elbow, mostly full but likely cold; with an absent gesture from Hawke, a glimmer of light pulsed up from the cup and the tea started to steam anew. She had several more cobalt blue vials in front of her, and with a pipette in her enviably steady hand, measured out magebane into each of the little bottles.

Hawke looked up when a board creaked beneath Fenris' feet.

"You're up early," she said with a crooked smile, then looked back down again, gently setting the pipette on a square of oiled leather alongside several other tools. She glanced briefly at her notes and nodded to herself before stoppering each of the small vials with corks numbered in ink, so she could tell the difference between the bottles.

"I could say the same of you."

Her smile widened and she pushed away from the table, stretching out her legs and crossing them at the ankle. "I barely slept a wink last night." At his raised eyebrows she nodded at the bottles and phials across her desk. "I got up early to, ah, dispose of the previous attempts and rinse out the bottles."

Such a poison was not easily disposed of. Fenris knew it and doubtless Hawke knew it too. "Might I ask where you chose to dispose of them?"

The look she shot him was guileless, an echo of the woman he'd first met, capturing the crowd's attention with her red dress, a wink, a sweeping curtsey. It all seemed so long ago, and yet he knew it had only been the better part of two weeks. "The well, obviously." Then guilelessness vanished with a cocked eyebrow and an arch grin. "Appearances to the contrary, Fenris, I do know what I'm doing."

His brows lowered. "I did not mean to imply—"

She reached out, flicking a finger at the bottle of laudanum, her nail tapping against the glass. "Burned it. Early this morning. I stayed away—far away from the fumes, but… well," she said, shrugging, "the alcohol in the laudanum burns off and takes damn near everything with it."

He nodded, impressed. "Effective."

"And pretty. I've never seen anything burn quite like a magebane tincture." Then Hawke wrinkled her nose. "Pretty enough colors to almost make up for the horrific stench of it, anyway," she added. "Maker have mercy, it was foul."

Fenris allowed himself a soft snort of laughter and took a step closer to the table, perching on the edge of a hay bale pulled away from the rest; it sat at a jaunty angle next to the worktable and held overflow from the shelves: a stack of books, some untitled—grimoires, no doubt—to thick tomes with titles including Man from the Medical Point of View, The Anatomical Society of Ferelden: A Journal of Anatomy and Physiology, Orlesienne Society Médicale: Une Étude sur Les Maladies et Les Infections, and Herbology: Medicinal Plants of Thedas; bottles of ink and leatherbound journals, their pages rippled with wear between the covers and scraps of paper peeking out to mark important pages. He took a seat on the edge of the hay bale, careful not to disturb the other items resting there.

On Hawke's worktable, another leather journal lay open, only half the pages written on, the other half smooth and pristine and as yet unsullied by ink; a pestle weighted down the pages against the breeze coming through the hatch. "And now?" he asked.

"And now…" she echoed, looking at her work. "And now I think I'm…" she ran a finger along a line of script in her notebook and pursed her lips. "I think I'm close. I think I'm very close." Hawke looked up, and her smile was back, reaching her eyes and warming them. "Who knows?" Hawke said, holding his gaze; despite what Fenris suspected was residual paleness from the week's tests, color flared at her cheeks. She swallowed and then, though her smile widened, something in Hawke's expression faltered like a shutter in a storm, and with a jerk she blinked and looked back down at her notes. "You probably won't even have to carry me back to the house this time."

"Hmm."

Hawke snorted, placing the pestle back in its mortar and closing her notes as she arranged and rearranged the small, slender vials according to strength. "Please try to rein in your confidence, Fenris," she said lightly, smoothing a finger over the top of one marked cork. "It's embarrassing." Then, twisting slightly on her stool, Hawke picked up her teacup and took a sip. "Well," she said, tapping her finger against the rim of her cup as she slid a glance sideways to him, then back to her cup. "That's three more potions down. One of them's got to be my ticket into Kirkwall."

"You'll begin with the strongest of the three?"

She nodded. "And work down to the weakest."

Fenris nodded at the vials. "How are you certain you're getting the same amount from each sample?"

"It's better, actually," she said, turning on the stool again and setting her teacup on the table, "if the tests aren't exactly the same dosage every time, you see—dosing myself on the road isn't necessarily going to be a precise process. As I need stronger doses, I'll take more." As she spoke, she worked free the cork from one of the bottles and took the pipette up between her fingers. "For my purposes right now, I'm taking…" Hawke dipped the pipette into the vial and measured out some of the liquid, "roughly this much, I'd say."

Scarcely an inch of jewel-toned liquid shimmered in the glass tubing.

"It…"

"Isn't much. I know. Magebane packs a wallop, as you've already seen." Then she reached out and released the suspended tincture into tea. At Fenris' look, she shrugged. "No time like the present, I think." She set the pipette aside and re-stoppered the vial. "And I'm curious as to whether anything can make this stuff taste less awful." She gave the tea a quick stir, and took a cautious sip, and then another.

"Is the taste improved?"

Hawke wrinkled her nose and looked down into the cup, as if divining answers to an unspoken question in its depths. "It's still awful," she murmured, putting the cup to her lips again and drinking deeply. "It's just… a different type of awful. Hard to say whether it's slightly less awful than before or slightly—"

Hawke's words cut off into silence as she went suddenly and entirely white. With a graceless abruptness he'd never seen from her before, she spun around on the small stool, her teacup falling clumsily from her fingers—he reached out, but bare seconds too late, and it landed with a hollow crack, splintering into three jagged pieces as it fell upon the plank floor, tea seeping into the wood grain.

"Hawke—"

"Shit," she breathed, gripping the table's edge. "Shit."

Her face, already gone alarmingly pale, started edging into grey—faster than any of the previous week's trials—and Fenris pushed to his feet. Hawke looked as if she were about to stand, but then tilted unsteadily and pitched forward. Fenris caught her about the waist an instant before her knees buckled, keeping her steady as he maneuvered her down upon the hay bale, sending the tower of books toppling to the floor as he told himself her cold fingers and pale lips were normal, that the deep bruise-blue shadows beneath her eyes were normal, that every struggling, reed-thin breath was normal.

#

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Amelle could not believe she'd done something so monumentally stupid.

The pipette glinted innocuously in a shaft of early morning sunlight, its inside coated with laudanum and magebane. But above the line where the tincture had been, the glass still bore the faint shimmer of pure, undiluted magebane. Certainly more than enough to alter the concentration of her tiny dose.

Idiot. She was such an idiot.

Damn him and his attentive questions and his damned eyes and—damn him anyway.

Fenris said her name, attentive curiosity thickening into alarm. Well, at least there was that. At least she wasn't alone up here—granted, the fact that she wouldn't have made such an error if she'd been alone was neither here nor there.

Lyrium. She needed lyrium. Fenris had seen her through enough trials to know this step. There was a cache of potions tucked away on her topmost shelf. It was only two, maybe three steps from where she sat now, but retrieving a bottle of lyrium potion right now would mean first she'd have to stand, and then she'd have to walk. She gripped the edge of the table until her fingers ached and tried pushing to her feet, but the world tilted and swayed and the room spun and Maker help her, she was dumb sometimes.

And then Fenris' hands, warm and sure, were supporting Amelle, lifting her easily, setting her carefully on the bale of hay where he'd been sitting and she sunk to one side, supporting herself on one elbow.

To his credit, Fenris wasn't hovering, wasting time asking foolish questions she couldn't answer. ("What happened?" "What did you do?" "Why are you an idiot?") Bottles clinked and rattled upon their shelves as he rifled through them, searching, she knew, for that tell-tale blue shimmer.

"Top one," Amelle managed, the words sounding dry and paper-thin to her ears. Heaviness pressed in all around her—beyond the terrifying suddenness of Amelle's connection to the Fade going suddenly, frighteningly silent, her mana stilling in her veins as abruptly as a candle going dark in the thick of a storm—Amelle's throat was tight and dry, and her icy fingertips had started to go numb. The air around her was too thick and heavy to breathe; drawing it into her lungs was an effort—something Amelle realized around the same time she realized the thin, reedy wheezing wasn't a far off goat or sheep in distress. It was her.

Then there was warmth beside her, a hand supporting her head, cool glass pressed to her lips and the welcome, bitter caress of lyrium potion upon her tongue, sliding down as she swallowed, coating her dry, raw throat.

The horrible weight crushing down on her slowly ebbed away and the pressure on her lungs eased. Even her quieted mana was not so oppressively silent. All that remained now was nausea's leaden weight, clawing determinedly in her stomach. Thank the Maker she'd only had tea this morning, and after a desperate, sputtering choke that nearly sent her tumbling away from Fenris (his hands still gripped her shoulders, preventing her from lurching away completely and falling to the floor or worse, out of the hayloft entirely), she didn't even have that any more.

"Hawke," Fenris finally said when the worst had passed. His voice was tight with urgency as he spoke her name, and when Amelle forced herself to look, she saw the very eyes she'd nearly got lost in earlier, glaring with enough heat to stoke the embers of her foolishness and carelessness and embarrassment. Amelle grimaced and turned her head away; the taste in her mouth was vile and she imagined her breath wasn't much better. Yes, let's not subject him to bad breath after you nearly accidentally poisoned yourself, came the scathing thought. Very good, Madame Healer.

"Hawke," Fenris said again, his scant patience vanishing so like her mana had moments ago. "What happened?"

Fenris, Amelle noted distantly, did not let his voice tilt upward at the end of a question, like normal people did. His inquiries came out as barely-controlled demands, and she knew if she didn't answer him, didn't tell him something (not the truth, anything but the truth), those questions would only get growlier.

Growlier. Was that even a word?

"Hawke."

Didn't matter, even if it wasn't. It was still apt.

Amelle took in a deep breath and let it out again. "The pipette," she muttered thickly, closing her eyes because she didn't care to see Fenris' reaction to her explanation. "It was the pipette," she said again, stronger this time. "I used it to measure out the magebane. The residue… there was residue." She didn't say any more for several seconds.

"Which… tampered with its… strength."

Amelle gave a weak nod.

He sighed out a word she didn't recognize, but the cadence of which could not have been anything but a curse.

#

It took far longer for the color to return to Hawke's lips than it had for the poison to leech it away, but in time her fingers were, if not warm, then less cold and clammy. Gradually, too gradually, the grey cast faded into something less deathly and Fenris exhaled a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding.

When green eyes opened—hesitantly, and with a flinch that told him her head was pounding—Hawke looked around blearily and then up at him as if she couldn't understand either how they'd come to be there on a bale of hay, or why he held her, her body resting awkwardly against his.

"You must be more careful."

She turned her head away, grimacing. "Don't need to tell me twice."

Once more of Hawke color had returned to her face, Fenris eased her to her feet. Maneuvering the ladder down from the hayloft was managed carefully. Hawke acquiesced to Fenris carrying her down, slung over one shoulder, but the minute they were both on solid ground again, and without a word of warning, Fenris wrapped an arm around Hawke's body, hooking the other beneath her knees and lifted her, ignoring the faintest twinges of complaint from nearly-healed injuries. For a moment, Hawke looked as though she were going to protest, but then, with a tired sigh, she relaxed against him, closing her eyes. The absence of any protest troubled him more than anything else and, setting his jaw, Fenris began the walk back to the house. Hawke's mother didn't appear to be in the garden but—no, there, by the well and easy enough to evade. He still didn't know how much Hawke had told her mother of these… preparations of hers and the less he had to explain, the better. Fenris opened the door, fumbling the knob slightly before shouldering it open and letting it slam behind them. Again Hawke winced.

He tried tempering his concern with every step up the stairway, boots echoing hollowly against the wood. He'd been truthful when he told her he admired her desire to control her abilities. He'd likewise been truthful when he said he trusted her judgment. Intellectually he knew that such… mishaps were bound to happen, and in truth he was relieved to have been nearby when such an incident occurred.

But he did not want to be witness to another such event.

Setting Hawke carefully on the edge of her bed, Fenris dropped to one knee, briskly working first one boot free from her foot and then the other.

"Lie back," he said, standing and turning toward the pitcher of fresh water she kept, pouring a glass. By the time he turned back around, Hawke had curled herself beneath the quilt. She looked small and pale, her short hair plastered dark and damp against her brow.

He pressed the glass into Hawke's slack hand. "Take this." Hawke drank with the tentative eagerness of one desperately thirsty, but afraid of the repercussions that came from drinking too much, too fast. As she drank, Fenris walked from one end of the room to the other and back again, pausing at the open window. He leaned forward, bracing both hands on the windowsill and looked outside. Merrill emerged from the chicken coop with a basket of eggs hanging from one elbow, and Tomas and Kellen were hitching up one of the horses to the plow. Leandra Hawke called out something to Merrill, who answered in kind—the rhythm of the Hawke farm beat like a steady, constant pulse. He did not blame Hawke for wishing to stay; it was the sort of place that beckoned to you, urging you to stay, even if you had no place here.

He found himself wondering exactly what Hawke's place was here. For all she clearly loved the farm, she did not seem to have a… place there. It was none of his concern, but he found himself curious all the same.

Then her soft, hoarse voice broke the silence and scattered his thoughts. "Thanks."

His back to her, Fenris grimaced and shook his head. "You… must not be so careless," he said, the words awkward and thick in his mouth. Hawke offered no reply but a tired sigh.

Several seconds ticked by before she spoke. "I know. I… it was going well. I suppose I got… overconfident." Hawke paused, and for a moment Fenris was certain she was going to say something else. But she only exhaled a long, exhausted sigh. "Thank you," she said again.

Turning his back on the window and the activity below, Fenris looked again at Hawke. She clutched the near empty water glass in both hands, though her eyes drooped shut. Exhaling hard through his nose, he went to the side of her bed and gently extricated the glass from her hands, setting it carefully on the bedside table. "You must rest."

Her only answer was a sleepy hum he believed to be acquiescence.

Once Hawke's breathing slowed and evened, her head lolling tiredly to the side, he dragged a chair to her bedside and, hesitating only briefly, sat upon it, fidgeting a few seconds before clasping his hands and resting his elbows upon his knees. Hawke's color was improving, but slowly, and there was nothing to do but wait for the magebane to leave her system.

He did not enjoy waiting.

It was still a foreign idea to Fenris, that a mage would willingly undergo such measures for such a purpose—in his experience, mages never worried about concealment, never troubled themselves with anything but gaining power and influence. And yet here Hawke was, voluntarily poisoning herself by inches for that very reason while Fenris watched, doing nothing more useful than handing her bottle after bottle of lyrium potion, knowing it would counteract the poison—it would only counteract it—and knowing there was still more he could do for her.

That was the trouble, wasn't it? Fenris knew perfectly well there was more he could do to assist Hawke, and yet he balked. What good could come of revealing that to her?

What good indeed?

It was not such a revelation, he decided, breathing in and pulling at the power inside him, letting it grow and shift and burn until his skin was alight with it, if Hawke was not awake to observe it. She slept on as Fenris laid white-glowing fingers against the top of her hand, allowing a slow trickle of the lyrium in his skin to phase into her. After a time, the furrow at her brow relaxed. The color returned to her cheeks. Her breath cleared, coming in long, and slow, deep pulls, one after another, after another.

Fenris took his hand away, his markings going dim. Hawke had saved his life. This was not, perhaps, a direct reciprocation of that favor, but it was something, and it was enough to make him feel as though he'd at least begun to balance the scales between them.

#

It took less than three days for Amelle to perfect the tincture after that single—thankfully unrepeated—mishap; as she'd guessed, she'd been close to perfecting it, and sailing was smooth from that point on. Her accidental poisoning hadn't even turned out to be as serious as she'd feared. A few hours of rest had her up and around, feeling more than well enough to return to her workbench and resume her trials. Fenris still accompanied her, still assisted, though he was even more taciturn than usual during the process, which Amelle didn't view as a problem, since it was his brief foray into attentiveness that had set the stage for her particularly spectacular bungle. Taciturn was good.

Once the tincture was ready, once she'd tested it and tested it and tested it again and then one more time for good measure—Maker, she was going to have to do something about the taste—they began preparing for the trip in earnest.

The hour was so early the rooster hadn't even split the dim sky with his call. Everything was packed, saddlebags bulging with necessities, supplies strapped within an inch of their lives and attached to every conceivable surface. They had decided it would be quicker to travel without the wagon, which meant stopping at inns when they could and sleeping beneath the stars when they couldn't. Varric had written ahead to a… colleague in Highever who would board the horses while they were in Kirkwall. ("A colleague," Amelle had asked him dubiously, "who won't sell the horses the moment our backs are turned?" The dwarf had promised her Falcon and company would be perfectly safe, and since Varric didn't often promise, Amelle trusted him when he did.)

It was a long ride to Highever, but their route was plotted with known inns and towns and safe places to rest. Unfortunately, and there was no going around it without adding even more days to the trip, one of the plotted rest points was Kinloch Hold. Marshall Greagoir didn't have quite the reputation Meredith Stannard did, but that wasn't any reason to go courting trouble, in Amelle's opinion. She hadn't even really wanted to pack a stave at all, given where they were going and where they had to go through to get there. At least when she traveled with Isabela and Varric and the wagon, they had some control in avoiding templar presence. This trip, though, was a different kettle of fish entirely. But, all things being equal, it was more dangerous (to say nothing of stupid) to go without, so she packed Daddy's staff anyway, all wrapped up in leather, at least marginally confident the bladed end would keep people from getting too suspicious.

Hah. She had to walk around with a giant knife to keep people from getting suspicious.

Amelle told herself this would be the perfect opportunity to test the tincture, but those reassurances did nothing to quell the nervous jittering in her stomach, and they hadn't even left home yet.

The screen door squeaked open and her mother's light step clicked softly across the porch as she came to join Amelle at the railing. Neither of them spoke for a moment, but it was her mother who wound up breaking the silence in the end.

"It looks like you're nearly ready to go."

Amelle nodded and let out a sigh. "Should be, and soon. Even Isabela's ready to head out, and you know how she is about mornings."

Mama laughed, shaking her head at Isabela; Tango's pack was as heavy as Agrippa's was light. "Oh, it's the travel she loves. The adventure of it all. Even I can see that."

Amelle nodded again because her mother was right, of course. "I'll remind her of that when she's complaining of saddle sores."

Mama wrapped a warm arm around her shoulders and Amelle couldn't help but lean into it. "Right before you give her something for them."

"Like a boot in the rear?"

Mama gave her shoulder a light slap. "Now, Amelle…"

She tilted her head to the side until it came to rest against her mother's. "I know, I know."

They stood in the pre-dawn hush and Amelle watched Fenris commune with Agrippa; the pale horse easily carried the lightest load and if anything she looked grateful for it, nuzzling at his hands, her ears pricked forward. However long it took to get them to Kirkwall, that would be where they parted ways, and Amelle wasn't entirely sure how she felt about that. He'd been… interesting company these few weeks, if nothing else.

She blushed to remember the sight of him, axe held firmly in his hands as he split logs into firewood.

Very interesting company.

"Darling?" Mama's voice broke into Amelle's thoughts and her blush went suddenly flame-hot for a moment.

"…Yes?"

Mama looked out at the horses, Cedric grazing while Falcon stood placidly, eyes closed, tail moving like a slow, swishing pendulum. "I do… understand how difficult this is for you. Don't think for a moment I don't know that."

Varric came sauntering up, Bianca bouncing gently against his back. "Finally got the last of Isabela's gear—"

"You mean the two new dresses she bought in town?"

He coughed into his fist. "You know how she gets when there's treasure involved, Hawke. Anyway, we got Rivaini's stuff packed and strapped. So whenever you're ready…" He looked between mother and daughter for a second and nodded. "I'll just… go make sure Isabela doesn't try rearranging her pack again. Whenever you're ready."

Straightening, Amelle turned back to her mother, drawing in a deep breath and pushing forward a smile. Too many things about this trip had her worried, but that wasn't a burden she was inclined to share right now. "I… I know you do, Mama. And I… think I understand why you asked." She didn't like it, and the prospect scared her, but Amelle at least understood her mother's reasoning.

"It's been too long that my babies haven't spoken. No mother wants to see that, sweetling. And no matter how it turns out… well." Mama reached up, running her fingers through Amelle's short hair, her fingertips resting lightly against her temple. "At least you'll have tried." Her mother's voice caught a little and when Amelle turned, she found her mother blinking back tears as dawn pricked the horizon. "Thank you for going, Amelle. And tell Carver—"

"Don't thank me yet," she said softly, leaning close and brushing a kiss across her mother's smooth cheek. "And don't give me any complicated messages to convey. We don't even know if he's going to talk to me or not."

Mama hugged her fiercely. "I think your brother might surprise you if you let him."

He might, Amelle thought, returning the hug. Let's just hope it's a good sort of surprise and not one of the bad ones.