The wind off the bay was warm and heavy with salt. The summer rains had come to the desert late and heavy this year, and the wreaths and bouquets and falling tresses of the Flower Festival were going past their prime, even as colorful as they still were days after plucking and arranging, and the city was starting to fill with the sweet wet smell of rotting blooms. The adobe roof below him was warm against his back with residual heat from the daytime sun, and night sky overhead was dark in the new moon and brilliantly clear. The stars made pictures of griffins and owls and prowling bears, and a dragon roared from the top of a high tower over the sea.
"Rinna," Zevran said, still staring at stars. There was a certain curve to them, lines he was sure he would know as well as the feel of his own body if only- if only something. "I think there's something wrong with me."
She chuckled- a warm, bright sound, currently thick with Tevinter wine.
"Wrong with you?" she asked, rolling over to trace the lines of his chest with a finger. "The only thing wrong here is that it's been weeks since we got a good contract. We'll find some pretty thing for you distract soon, Zevran."
His name sounded strange in her mouth. The wine made the 'z' hiss and the 'v' too soft and the vowels distinctly foreign- Safraaaaaaahn….
Had he heard that before?
Taliesin stole a deep, distracting kiss.
"I'll have you know," he said loftily, propping himself up on his elbows. "That I am very pretty."
"Prettier now that you can finally wear a Master's armor," Rinna teased him. "It took you long enough. Holding the both of us up, you were."
Taliesin snorted.
"Well excuse me for being a big clumsy human-"
"I like that you're big," she told him. "And Zevran's a full-blooded elf who falls out of windows, I'll remind you, so no excuses."
Zevran traced the lines in the sky with his eyes. He was sure they joined up, made a full pattern, but he couldn't figure out how.
Rinna hooked a leg over his hip and pulled herself on top of him.
"Hey," she said, blocking his view of the sky. "You're not paying attention."
A griffin was looking at him over her shoulder.
"There's something-"
Rinna leaned down, pressing herself against him, and stopped him with a kiss. Taliesin's fingers threaded into his hair, angling his head back just the right amount to encourage it to become deeper, hotter. He'd always liked watching before joining the show himself.
"Stop thinking," Taliesin told him. "You think too much. You don't need to make this difficult for yourself. There's nothing wrong."
Rinna pulled back just enough to let Zevran catch his breath before they moved on to other things. Antivan summer nights were for lovers, after all; and they'd all become Crow Masters just a few hours ago. They had something to celebrate.
"It's all right," she murmured against his lips.
Anders couldn't remember the last time he'd been this bone-tired. Maybe one of the escape attempts? Or his first days in Kirkwall?
But nothing quite compared to the emotional exhaustion accompanying the strain of doing so much healing magic over the last days. He'd had low reserves- or no reserves- before, but he'd never had quite so much personally riding on whether a healing worked or not, or a patient he could do so little for as Zevran.
Or the Commander. He wasn't physically hurting, and Anders's magic couldn't do anything about the absolute mess he was at the moment. Zevran's little chance at getting free again had broken whatever resolve he'd been holding himself together with, and Alistair was sitting next to him across the table as Anders tiredly worked through breakfast. The Commander was flopped forward onto the table. He'd used all his energy up on crying and had nothing left to use on pretending to be all right, or functional, or anything but absolutely consumed by Zevran's condition.
Anders was familiar with that sort of despair. You just had to wait it out; though there was always the danger that maybe it wouldn't go away. He could easily see the Commander just sitting down and refusing to move, if Zevran ended up dying anyway. Just sitting there and not eating, not drinking, in his own sort of grieving solidarity, until he wasted away as well.
Although he'd have to fight for it. If nothing else, Anders was certain that Alistair would force-feed the Commander and bully him into doing something, even if it was just going into the Deep Roads early, rather than see him give up and wait for death to take him. Theron would never give up on him, or any of the rest of his people, and Alistair would return the favor.
So would Anders, so long as he had the energy to move- though scathing commentary delivered from a prone position could be very effective. Actually, none of the others would give up on the Commander, either. His chances at outliving Zevran were probably a lot higher than he wanted them to be.
He finished the food in front of him and mustered up the resolve to go upstairs to where Merrill and Viktory and Andreas were shut in with the blood magic books again. He'd probably just fall asleep in a chair and contribute nothing of real assistance, but he'd have tried, and they'd wake him up if Zevran needed him again. He would have gone back to Zevran's room, but Nathaniel and Sigrun had chased him out and taken watch themselves, since they weren't going to be in any danger even if Zevran woke up unexpectedly. He'd be too weak to do anything about the Magister's kill order.
Viktory and Merrill were having a quiet, intense argument when he shuffled into the room. Andreas looked to be staying well out of it, and Anders didn't blame him. Viktory was not happy that Merrill had switched the thralldom into her control, and Merrill was refusing to be sorry. Anders wasn't too worried about it- Merrill was a nice person, even though she had huge gaping blind spots, like blood magic. Even if she hadn't known Theron before this, she would never have thought to exploit the thralldom.
"It might be the only way," Merrill said as Anders located the most comfortable-looking chair and collapsed in it.
"We're here to remove the compulsions, not replace-"
He didn't hear the rest of it, because he dropped right off into sleep.
It was raining in Rialto. It didn't usually, but it was coming down in sheets, and Zevran was out in the streets alone. Everything was deserted, the other citizens driven inside by the rain. A few glass-fronted tavernas were warm and brightly-lit, spilling gold over the wet, cracked slabs of ancient rough granite that paved the major roads.
Why was he out in this weather?
His Crow Master's leather armor was soaked through. This was not the proper way to treat your equipment, but being out here was… important. It had something to do with the way that his new armor sat wrong, too light all over even though this was nicest set he'd ever owned and it was heavier than the other sets the Crows had given him. He couldn't shake the feeling that there should be something shiny, something more, about it. His mind flashed on Templar armor, and he shook his head to clear it. That was ridiculous.
Someone had forgotten about their laundry, and Zevran stopped in the middle of the road and blankly watched a sodden blanket, striped white and blue, for what could have been a few minutes or an entire hour. There was no sense of time, here in the rain.
He started walking again. A printshop had posted their available titles outside the door, and the only legible part left, where the ink hadn't run, said 'story of Fereldan Ki'.
"Chichino!" someone called through the rain. It echoed slightly in the empty streets. "Chichino!"
The woman emerged from a side street. She was just a couple of inches shorter than him, but it was enough so that he could see over the top of her dark brown hair, shining gold in strips from the reflected lamplight. Ghilan'nan's horns spread across her forehead, a fitting crown to go with the forest green and sapphire blue of her dress.
"You scared me," his mother told him.
"Abelas, mama."
She gave him a look of mild reproof.
"What have I told you about mixing languages?" she asked. "And where you're allowed to use them?"
No El'vhen outside our rooms in the Summer Lily, that had always been the rule. This was something special between them, something no one else was allowed to touch, in a place where they owned nothing.
"Te pardone, mama."
She reached up and covered the tattoo running down one side of his face with her hand, sighing.
"We're going back now," she told him. "This is slaver weather."
Of course. That was why he was out here in this weather. He was trying to find his way home.
'Ma vhenan, the rain whispered against glass and granite, soft and tender and warm, full of loving promise.
The Summer Lily was one of Antiva's middling brothels- in the hierarchy of prostitution, they were not so disposable as the street whores, but not nearly so valued as the courtesans. The brothel master cared whether his prostitutes were alive at the end of the night or not, but that was as far as things went. On the in-house hierarchy, Nina Rivasina was near the top. Dalish were exotic, and humans were willing to pay much more for a chance to tame the wild elvhen woman. It was why they only spoke Antivan when anyone else was around. His mother would trade on her vallas'lin, on her accent in Antivan, on the few bits of Dalish clothing she still had, even on little details on life with her old clan for a little flare of mystery- but not her language. Not the way she spoke to her gods and her son.
Their rooms were at the top of the brothel, a bit cramped with worn wooden walls that splintered sometimes, if you accidentally ran into one at the height of the dry time of year. There were carpets on the floor to protect everyone's soles and shoes, even though that made the rooms on the lower floors progressively more stifling. The wool trapped the heat, kept it from rising away, out of the building.
The table was a little too low for him now, just enough to be uncomfortable. It had to be this height to fit under the window- glass, not good glass, but not bad glass either. A perk for his mother being one of the highest earners for the house. The rain wasn't saying anything now, but the running drops were making lines, the lines he knew but couldn't remember.
"I never wanted this for you," his mother said as she put dinner together- warmed-again fish chowder and leftover melon slices from the brothel's front entertaining room. "I wanted you to own yourself."
"I do, mama," he told her. "I always have. I've always made my own choices. It was my choice to take your place in the brothel when you were sick. It was my choice to agree to the courtesan training when the Crows said that was what I was fit for. And it's my choice which contracts I take, and how to execute the unspecified details."
"They're not really your decisions if you have no other choices."
"I could have chosen not obey the Masters, and they would have killed me. I could have chosen not to take up your work, and we would have been turned out into the street. But instead you are still alive, and now I am a Crow Master as good as any other."
She handed him his bowl.
"But we're hardly free."
"But we're not slaves," Zevran reminded her. "Mama, what's wrong? What happened to: 'But at least this isn't Tevinter'?"
She was staring into her own bowl. The surface of the chowder rippled as a tear fell into it.
"You deserved so much better, Satheraan," she said quietly and- he did know that name.
"'Many pleasant dreams'," he remembered. "There's something- Mama, I-"
A great eagle-owl smacked into the window, rattling the glass violently, and he startled.
"No. No! Go away!"
Justice didn't move.
"I shall not."
"I'm dreaming," Anders threatened. "Right now, this little bit of the Fade is mine! I will make you go!"
"No. I am guarding you against demons."
"I can do that myself!" Anders snapped at him. "Go guard a child who's spending their first night in a Circle or something, they need it a lot more!"
"Not now," Justice disagreed. "You have exhausted yourself. You have been in close proximity to blood magic for days. The demons are waiting."
"And I can handle it myself! I don't want your help! Or need it!"
"If you are so prepared, then perhaps you would have no objections to driving off other's demons."
Anders squinted suspiciously at him.
"Are you… trying to trick me into agreeing to something? Because if you were, that was a really bad attempt."
"I am more mortal than I was," Justice told him stiffly. "It does not mean that I am competent at it. I am no better than you are."
"I am definitely better than that!"
"Are you?" he asked. "You feel so much. Everyone can see."
"Well," Anders said grumpily. "You don't need to go calling attention to it."
"You care. It is a good thing. So you will help with the demons."
"Yes, I'll get rid of some mage's demons so they don't succumb to temptation!" Anders told him. "You should have opened with that!"
"He is not a mage."
Anders was about to ask why there was a demon problem if there wasn't a dreaming mage involved, but then they were in front of the Vigil's gates.
"If this is your way of telling me that some blood mage went and unleashed an army of demons on Amaranthine while we've been gone-"
"Blood thralls are as susceptible to demons as any scared mage," Justice told him. "Most never encounter one before they die, because the mage controlling them holds the demons off. But the Commander's-"
"We killed her," Anders said, and glared at the Vigil's gates. They flew open under the force of his bitter anger. "And Merrill doesn't know how any of this works!"
He strode up the path towards the Vigil's courtyard, a route he'd taken hundreds of times before. There was no one else here this time, and he could almost believe that something terrible had happened to his old home; except that he could see the Black City rising behind the central bulk of the fortress.
"Before they confined themselves to testing boundaries," Justice said. "They tested to see if they could attack without provoking a mage. For a while, after he fell asleep, there were mages about. Then, the demons attempted subtlety, and I could stand against them as I tried to wake him. But now there are no mages."
"He didn't fall asleep," Anders said as they mounted the stairs into the Vigil proper. "He started dying."
"Ah. That explains much. We should find him quickly."
The only thing everyone needed even less than Zevran dying was Zevran turning into some sort of abomination. Maker, what a week they'd had.
Velanna was dead in the main hall by the entrance, Oghren and Sigrun by one of the bookshelves. Viktory was slumped against the closed door to the hallway that led to the stairs up to the rooms, the Voshai were scattered in the hallway beyond. Nathaniel had fallen face-first across the handrail of the staircase, which had channeled his blood to pool on the bottom steps. They had to step over Kallian's body at the top, and Anders came face-to-face with his own corpse outside the Commander's rooms.
"If you're a demon," he hissed at it as Justice went ahead of him, because some outrages would not be tolerated. "I'm going to kick your ass if you don't go away right now."
Either really stupid demons were impersonating the dead, or they were all Fade constructs. Anders went into the Commander's rooms and shut the door behind him.
Zevran was standing over Alistair. His long knife and sword were still bloody and trembled in his hands, because Theron was here too, staring at him with wide, horrified eyes.
"How could you?" the demon wearing the Commander's face cried. "Zevran!"
"I-"
"They're all dead! All of them! It wasn't enough that we almost lost Nathaniel and only just got Anders back-"
"I'm right here," Anders said. Zevran didn't hear him. Typical demons.
Zevran dropped his weapons.
"Theron- 'ma'len I-"
"Don't call me that," the demon said, doing a good impression of heartbroken betrayal, and shoved him away. Zevran fell to the floor, stunned. The demon turned its back on him.
"I thought we'd fixed you," it sobbed. "I thought it really was all right now. I thought we could-"
"Theron-"
The demon turned fake despairing eyes on him.
"I can't trust you," it whispered.
Zevran was shaking all over and Anders knew a breaking point when he saw one coming. Time to stop this.
"I'm not dead," he said, stepping between Zevran and the demon. "And you can't have him."
Feet-long spears of ice knocked the demon back as, behind him, Zevran pleaded: "No no no! Don't hurt him he's right-"
The demon regained its footing and moved to come for him, but Justice got there first. He'd kill the thing if he could, and if not then he'd hold it off long enough for Zevran to take charge of his own dreamscape again.
"It isn't," Anders told Zevran, turning to face him. "You didn't kill anyone. Alistair stopped you. We killed the Magister and got the Commander and Kallian back."
"I-" Zevran said. "No, I- I did kill someone-"
"You didn't."
"Don't lie to me!" Zevran snapped at him, and then his face went slack with horror as he remembered. "Nathaniel."
"He's not dead," Anders said. "Zevran, look at me- he's not dead. I was right there, I healed him."
"But I-"
"If I hadn't been right there, yes, he would be dead," Anders agreed. "But I was and he isn't. If you can remember that then you can remember the rest of it. This isn't real and you know it!"
"The cellar," Zevran said, struggling with the demon's illusion. "Chains. Barrel?"
"We locked you up in the cellar to one of the barrel supports, yes."
"Kallian was there?"
"For a lot of it. Since she wasn't included in the Magister's kill order."
"Theron was there," Zevran said, rubbing at his eyes with the heels of his hands, like he had a bad headache. He sounded sure of himself now. The Vigil was going out of focus. "He was telling me stories. He sang, too. And prayed, because-"
He froze, and Anders felt a warning tug all through himself. What was- someone was trying to wake him up!
"I was dying," was the last thing he heard Zevran say.
Wardens were stubborn and mages were stubborn and so it stood to reason that Warden mages were the most stubborn sorts of people, and Merrill thought that she really should have realized this from knowing Anders for so long.
"There's nothing here and you know it," Merrill said. All the books were closed and Andreas was gone, because she was right about this. "The Magisters don't care about letting anyone go so there's nothing in the books, there's never going to be anything in the books no matter how many times we try 'looking at it a different way'. There's just-"
"It didn't do anything to Commander and if it doesn't work then he'll have two-"
Viktory stopped.
"Do you feel that?"
It took a moment of thought, but Merrill did. They both looked over at Anders.
"I don't think he usually gets demons," she said doubtfully. "But maybe without Justice…"
"He's been under a lot of stress this week," Viktory reminded her. "We'd better wake him up. Just in case."
It took a little prodding, but Anders did wake up- all at once, and with a curse as he shoved past them and ran down the hall.
"Anders!"
They caught up to him in Zevran's room, the light of a large spell just dying around his hands.
"That wasn't my nightmare," he told them. "Justice came to get me, because it turns out that on top of everything else blood thralldom just screams to every demon nearby: 'Look at me, I have no mental defenses, come feast on my soul!' And Kirkwall is crawling with demons."
That was just horrifying. The books hadn't said anything about that.
"He can't stay here," Merrill said. "You have to-"
"You have to fix him!"
"We can't!" Viktory yelled back.
Anders deflated.
"Shit."
Merrill crossed her arms.
"Stop it," she told Viktory. "Of course we can. You just won't-"
"It's an awful idea and we're not doing it!"
"Which one?" Merrill shot back. "Orders or-"
"You heard what Anders just said!" Viktory exclaimed. "If it doesn't work, which I don't think it will, then he's stuck with demons and darkspawn and thralldom! We might as well just kill him now!"
"When did darkspawn come into this?" Anders asked in alarm.
"Theron said I got rid of the taint in my eluvian by using my sort of blood magic," she told him. "So we could just go the other way and give Zevran the Taint. That should get rid of-"
Mistress Del's brother jumped up from where he'd been sitting in the corner with the dwarf Warden, listening.
"You will not-"
"-the blood thralldom," Merrill persisted. "Viktory keeps saying that it didn't do that for Theron but she's wrong about her details, just a couple of compulsions isn't enough to change something as big as being a Warden, you'd need something like that thralldom. But you give him the Taint and then you make him a Warden. That's what that man did when he took Theron. He said it was the only way to cure the Blight. So once you do that and it's gone then Zevran's fixed!"
"It doesn't actually work like that, Merrill," Anders said. "It doesn't go away. It never goes away."
"But Theron is walking around perfectly fine and alive," Merrill said. "That's better than Zevran will have otherwise."
Viktory had clenched her hands into fists again.
"You are not going to just Taint someone without their permission! And the Joining could kill him!"
"Then at least we did something!" Merrill exclaimed. "I promised Theron I'd fix him and this is the best I can do!"
"Viktory's right, though," the dwarf Warden said. "The Commander will never agree."
"He conscripted me," Mistress Del's brother disagreed.
"And did you tell him no?"
"I demanded to be hung instead. He didn't oblige me."
So there was some hope.
Alistair watched as Theron silently struggled with the choice his sister had brought him.
"Isn't there something else?" Theron asked hollowly. "Anything else."
"Do what Fenris suggested and kill him," Anders said. He and Viktory were here too, to lodge their complaints about Merrill's idea. "Commander, he- he might actually be right, about it being a mercy. All the things he's suffering under- it's no way to live."
Not that he's living much right now, Alistair thought, and knew that Theron was doing the same.
Merrill sighed.
"I could," she said. "I could try to find a command, or a lot of them that work together, that would give him back some control. But I don't know if it would work."
"Try it," Theron ordered. "Use me- try it on me first."
"Theron-" Alistair tried to say, but his friend kept talking over him.
"Even if all you can manage is to let him talk again-"
He visibly choked on his words.
"-then I can ask him. If he'd consent to being made a Warden."
Merrill nodded. Viktory didn't look much happier about this option than the Warden one, but turned to follow when the other left the room to start brainstorming.
"Anders," Theron said, and the mage hung back, giving Alistair a questioning look. He could only shrug in reply. He had no idea what Theron wanted.
"You," Theron said. "You were in his dreams?"
There was an awful note of wavering, longing hope in those words.
"It wasn't a nice dream, Commander," Anders told him. It was painfully clear that he was trying to be kind about this.
Alistair put a hand on Theron's back.
"Theron, maybe-"
"You saw him," Theron said to Anders, ignoring him. "How-"
"It was a nightmare," Anders said uncomfortably.
"But you saw him."
Anders took a deep breath.
"He was dreaming that he'd killed all of us," he said. "Not you. The demon trying to get him was pretending to be you. It rejected him. Told him 'I can't trust you'."
With his hand still on Theron's back, Alistair could feel his sharp, pained inhale as well as hear it.
"And you told him that it was a lie, didn't you? That I-"
"Of course I did," Anders said quickly. "Commander- of course. Merrill and Viktory woke me up before I could finish, but he was already breaking out of it himself. And Justice was still there. When I went down I cast enough magic on him to make it clear to any demons hanging around that there was a mage watching over him, so they'd better stay away unless they want a fight."
"Thank you," Theron told him. "Thank you, I-"
Alistair caught Anders's eye and jerked his head towards the door. He got the hint; but paused halfway through the turn towards the door.
"He knew you were there, Commander," he told him. "When I turned up and told him it was a lie he could remember that he'd tried to kill Nathaniel. I pushed him and he knew that we'd locked him up, and where, and that you and Kallian have been sitting with him. He heard you talking to him."
"Oh," Theron said. "Oh."
"He knows you're waiting for him, Commander. He knows we're trying. Even if we can't- he knows."
It took until late evening for Merrill to find the right words, and Theron spent all of them down in the cellar with Zevran because he could hear him or at least he had when he was awake, and just maybe if he sat and talked and told him he loved him and he loved him and he loved him- maybe it would make his dreams untroubled, give him something to fight the demons with.
In the end, it was simple enough, for both of them. A snap of magic across glass, and:
"You will always make your own choices."
Zevran woke up, or at least he hoped he did. It was getting hard to tell. When Anders had shown up- that illusion had started like this, a perfectly logical progression of events from being captured and un-thralled.
Except that he wasn't. There were just different words in his head overriding everything else now, and he wanted to curl up and shake at the knowledge of them, empty his stomach until he was hollow again and nothing mattered, nothing at all, because right now he was warm and there was a familiar weight next to him and Theron had been so worried but how was he supposed to live like this. He'd always made his own choices, prided himself on it, because sometimes that was all you could hold onto.
And now every second, he was being reminded that once, he hadn't been able to.
You will always make your own choices.
"Zev?"
He hadn't been expecting to hear that voice.
"Bela-"
His throat was sore and dry, like he'd been screaming. He didn't remember screaming.
"I'm supposed to go get Alistair now that you're up," she told him. "But I figured I should ask if you wanted to see anyone first."
Creators no.
"I thought maybe you might want to talk?" Isabela suggested, just a little hesitant, and sat down on the bed next to him, where he could see her, so he wouldn't have to think about moving.
"Theron-"
"Your man's been out cold since Merrill finished her questionably-safe practices," she said. "Anders knocked him out. Said it would help him get back on an even keel. He's not supposed to wake up for hours yet."
"I can't," Zevran said. "Not with him. He'll just blame himself, and he doesn't- he shouldn't."
Isabela hunted for his hand under the blankets and took it.
"I'm right here, Zev. And I locked the door."
"I couldn't stop myself."
The only safe place was in control. He'd learned that well and often through his whole life. The few times he'd given himself into someone else's power, no matter how marginal, had gone so badly. He'd let Rinna and Taliesin think for him, given them what love and trust he'd managed to hold on to, and been torn apart for the sake the Crows by it. That had been the biggest one, the one that had hurt the most; and he'd been so scared was still so scared to give himself to Theron but he'd stuck by it, hoped for better, and now he was here because he cared about people and had gone and done something stupid, stupid, stupid.
"Zev?"
It was suddenly too much to be lying in this bed next to Theron, Theron who'd cuddled up against his side and spent the last week trying to talk him back to himself because he loved-
"I dreamed about Antiva," he told her. "Rinna and Taliesin and my mother. Bela- tu pardone, non puezo restar qui ha veza."
I can't stay here any longer.
"I know a good place to get blind drunk on bad liquor," she offered. "It's also a great place to pick up a barfight. Or it's late enough to go highwayman-baiting. All sorts of weird cults and criminal orders come out at night around here. Nobody'll miss 'em. Or roof-running, if you feel up to it."
Crow-trained responses were coming back hard. He wanted to crawl out of his own skin with the wrongness of everything and the danger and he so badly wanted his hands around hilts again.
"Highwaymen."
She helped him sneak out the window. He didn't have armor or his own blades, but Isabela lent him some of her extra knives and he was- had been- a Crow, he was too good for street thugs. His armor was his speed and his reflexes, and if they failed him because he was still recovering from almost dying, so be it. A clean death was no bad thing.
But they didn't, or at least not enough for it to matter, and Isabela showed him all the best places in Kirkwall to ambush the unwary and the best alleys and side streets to lose people in, or use to separate one or two from a too-big group.
Zevran let her keep what she wanted from the dead, and Isabela let him take his time with the living, taking other's blood instead of having it taken from him, slow quick painless agony, and even with the ones he let go without even a scratch because he was making his own choices, he remembered that this was what he'd been made for. He tried to subsume everything under the wash of blood because if he could spill enough maybe he could forget where the boundary between red on the ground and red in his head was but
It's not too late. Come back and we'll make up a story. Anyone can make a mistake.
I never wanted this for you.
No one escapes the Crows.
Together we'll find out how much he likes having a blood thrall for a lover.
Such is the way Satheraan Nehna Revasina lived.
Dawn came and Zevran returned Isabela's daggers, reluctantly.
"You don't have to go back," she told him, because she was ever one for moving on. "If you want to do me a favor, I've got this problem named Castillon."
"You never go looking for small trouble, Bela," he said, not trying to squash the flare of interest he got at the idea of having a contract again, even informal. He had no idea if it was the leftover feeling of Antiva, or the pleasant no-thoughts of having something to kill. "The Felicisima Armada? Really?"
"We had a costly disagreement about cargo out of Orlais. He lost his goods, I lost my ship."
"I shall tell you if I do anything about it," he promised, and went back to the estate. He was in time for breakfast, and walked in bloody and mussed with a sharp edge in his chest that wanted to slice open everything, to prove that he could.
Alistair stared, because they'd been through so much together since meeting each other, but Zevran was well aware that this was the closest since a Denerim back-alley that he'd looked like just another killer.
Everyone else was staring, too, except for Theron. Theron clutched his bloody hands like they were the only real thing in the world, and his eyes said so much more than his words did- where have you been, I woke up without you, please I want you to be all right, I want this all to be over.
"Do you feel better now?" was all he asked.
No, Zevran wanted to say, because Theron would want the truth.
"Yes," he said instead, because maybe then Theron would let him go.