I did not know, until then, that you could disappear into someone's gaze, that bone and heart and breath could melt like shadow into light, until only light was left.
—Winter Rose, Patricia McKillip
—
The door clicked softly closed behind her. Hawke took in a long, silent breath, tired down to her marrow, then looked up and smiled. "Good evening."
A half-dozen women smiled back at her: old, young, dark, pale, one's hair cropped short to her ears and another with three layers of crowning braid. "Good evening, my lady," they answered, a low chorus of chiming bells, united in their beauty.
The pale one stepped forward. A slight woman, almost like gossamer. Her flaxen hair was bound high on her head—the prince had just said her name— "Your Highness," the woman said, and Hawke clawed back her own attention. "Please, come in, sit. You must be very tired."
A laugh barked out of her, inconsiderately coarse. "Forgive me," Hawke said immediately, her hand coming over her face, unable to resist even the slightest press on her shoulders towards the divan. "I'm sorry, I've forgotten—"
"Orana," the woman said gently, and Hawke's hand was tugged from her face to hold a small lead crystal glass instead. Something amber swirled inside, caught the candleflame. "Drink this, please, Your Highness. I will tell you their names now, and tomorrow morning when you have forgotten I will tell you again." She smiled, sweet and dimpling. "You are in good hands, my lady. Be at peace."
She wanted to smile, but the tears surged just as readily towards any breach in the dam. She took a sip instead and found spirits, sharp and bracing. The world came back with stronger color. "Thank you, Orana. That's very kind."
"Yes, my lady," she said, and gestured one by one at the ladies-in-waiting who had been chosen for her, already bustling about the room now that she had been successfully plied with brandy. Caitlin, an older, stern-looking woman with silver hair in a red net, passed back and forth between the sitting room and the bedchamber just beyond, laying heated stones upon the turned-down bed to warm it, stoking the fire with a brass-handled poker. Roisin and Clara, clearly sisters with the freckles spattering every inch of their skin, went into the bathing room adjacent and did something there with a spark of low, gentle power Hawke could feel in her teeth. A few minutes later steam began to wisp through the open doorway, fragrant with orange-blossom.
Thérèse, glorious copper hair bound in intricate Orlesian twists, gave her a maternal smile as she pressed a plate of sweetmeats and biscuits into her hands. Hawke had forgotten she held the brandy and nearly dropped it as she tried to accept the lovely bronze dish; Orana rescued both, smiled, and waved away Hawke's clumsy, embarrassed apology. Thérèse took pity on her, bringing a low table of ivory inlay to Hawke's elbow, and sat beside Hawke as she desperately scrambled for her mother's grace.
"Eat," Thérèse said, in the voice of one who had often given the same instruction to little children. Her accent was thickly, beautifully Orlesian. "We saw you at dinner, my lady. Talking very much, eating nothing at all."
Numbly, Hawke ate a small toasted biscuit with a fine layer of cheese and ham and jelly. The flavor was strong, delicious; she ate another, took a sip of brandy, then laughed. "Have you many children, Thérèse?"
"Five of my blood, my lady, and two more of my heart." She smiled, the laugh-lines deep at the corners of her mouth. "But they need me less now, so I go where I find those who need caretaking."
Hawke laughed again, more rueful, and Thérèse folded her hands in her lap with supervisory authority. Orlitte had settled herself in the corner near a brace of candles, the youngest of all of them—seventeen at the most, Hawke guessed, and that was generous—busily threading a needle through worn lavender fabric. Hawke's own shirt, she realized belatedly, her tunic with Bethany's roses worn to weft and even thinner in some places, stained so badly with mud and dust and blood the original color could not be seen. Someone had washed it carefully, pulled out most of the muck. Orlitte's needle flashed, and a brass toggle secured itself decisively to the placket once more.
"Orlitte," Hawke said, and the girl looked up. A little nervous, a slender face and black eyes, a weak chin that she might yet grow out of. "Do you think it can be saved? The tunic?"
Orlitte looked down, winced, made a middling gesture. One of the seams at the waist had come completely apart—the place, Hawke realized, where the satchel had rested for months—and the girl stuck her thumb through it with a meaningful eyebrow.
"What about the embroidery at the collar? Even if it has to be cut away."
That yielded a surer smile. Orlitte nodded, then covered her own silent laugh as Thérèse forced another bite into Hawke's mouth.
"Thank you," Hawke said sincerely, and swallowed. "It was done for me by my—by my sister—"
The lump in her throat shocked her with sudden pain. They had reached Starkhaven. After everything she and—after everything, they had at last made it to An Taigh Gheal, both of them, alive despite all efforts to the contrary, and Hawke would see her sister again. Would even see her soon, she knew, only a few little weeks between them, a fast horse and a letter and a ship and a glass-green sea—
Hawke shot to her feet. The plate rattled as she placed it quickly atop the silver table; she downed the brandy in one swallow and set the glass aside as well. "Forgive me," she said, unsteady and very fast, "but it's been such a long day and I—I'm afraid—I'm sorry, have you any paper? And a pen?"
It was not what she meant to ask, and Orana saw it in her face; she clucked like she was nearer Thérèse's fifty than her own early twenties, and at her gesture the women set aside their tasks and came to her like a flock of hummingbirds crowding a cup of nectar. In a way it was a relief to have the decisions taken from her; she simply stood still, and kind hands pulled the gold pins from her hair and the gold rings from her fingers, unlaced the blue samite and the gold kirtle, loosened her stays and pulled them away, tugged off wool and organdy and at last linen so fine she could see her fingers through it. A dressing gown replaced it, soft and heavy and with fleece at the collar, and then Orana took her by the shoulders and drove her like a lamb into the bathing room.
The steam was thick now, the array of stained-glass bottles atop the sideboard beading with heat and condensation. Hawke flexed her fingers, struggling for a light tone. "Too much road dust still clinging to me, then? I'm sorry, Orana, but I don't think I've enough skin left on me to stand another burnishing with that pumice stone of yours."
"That was for your body earlier," Orana said sharply, but her eyes were gentle as she touched Hawke's temple. "This is for the mind." Her fingertips fell. "And the heart. In, please, Your Highness."
The raging lump in her throat had returned, but Hawke let her take the dressing gown and stepped into the tub. It was made of porcelain and very large, and when she leaned back the steaming water rose to her chin. Someone had scattered rose petals over its surface; someone else had added a thick soap and coaxed it to white, frothing suds. Her bath this afternoon had been half-full and barely warm, most of her pulled this way and that and scrubbed within an inch of her life by firm hands and hard soap in a very coordinated rush. Now—luxurious beyond reckoning; kind beyond words. Hawke lifted her eyes to the ceiling, counted the carved tiles there, and did what she could not to cry.
Behind the tub, Orana gathered her hair over the lip and began to comb it. She had shut out the rest of the women without Hawke's noticing; someone in the next room began to pick out a sweet tune on a lap-harp, and occasionally a merry laugh rippled through wood and water.
If Hawke shut her eyes, could she pretend the rest of the world had gone with it? Just this and nothing else, a hollow moon hidden by steamed window-glass; the low echo of water lapping against porcelain, against her skin; the sharp, heavy sweetness of orange-blossom. Orana's light hand and the comb in her hair, repetitive, soothing, drawn from crown to tip and back again, gathered behind her ears and run through with her fingers and let loose once more.
She did not keep ladies-in-waiting in Kirkwall. She'd tried more than once at her mother's insistence, but few noble-born women there had been interested in riding out with her to the hinterland farms and rucking up under a log when a sudden storm threatened to blow her off the road. Bethany's temperament had merited better luck, along with two maids who guarded her jealously and hissed and spat like cats when Hawke came too close with her farmland mud, but they unbent enough to help her dress in the evenings when her trousers and tunics would not suffice.
Instead Hawke had taken girls with no family—or no good family, anyway—and brought them to the castle under that title, only to foist them off instead to tutors she'd left behind long ago. A lady-in-waiting offered respectability far beyond the reach of most of the impoverished, especially in the lowest portions of the city and the far reaches of the country where the barons rode maybe once a month, where many things happened unseen in a farmhold's shadow. Some liked it and stayed, growing to adulthood with a world opened to them which had not been before; some—few—were willing between lessons to ride out with her and Aveline; and some chose to leave even still, and went to Evelina's or to other foster families who would gladly open their doors and tables.
Was it enough, after everything? She did not know.
Regardless, she could not remember the last time someone beside her mother or an impatient Agatha had brushed her hair. Her breath was slowing, coming more evenly; the bath's heat pressed out aches at last from the middle of her back, from her cramping calves. She had forgotten how thin the soles of dancing slippers could be.
Had forgotten, too, how silk felt on her skin, the weight of jeweled rings on her fingers. The jewels were finer in Kirkwall—some of the stones she'd seen tonight had been children's gifts at home—but the sheer wealth of the food on their gold platters, the color and richness and volume as they ate at their bountiful tables—that, more than anything else thus far, had stung her pride. Silk and miniver and golden braid, and not one of them aware that their kingdom's greatest prize lay speared beneath their forks.
Tender meat sliced thin as paper; beaded slippers with leather soles cut just as thin. How often luxury prided itself on fragility. Kirkwall had little use for such delicate baubles; gods alone knew that before Sebastian's ambassadors had come she'd hardly worn a gown in months outside assembly. Then all at once they'd been needed every night, lest the polished cortege from Starkhaven sneer down their marble noses at the mountain's homespun provinciality.
But that was unfair to Sebastian, she thought, who had given no censure and every welcome, whose letters admired her mountains and offered the bare, unrestrained love of his own plains in their place. He had been thoughtful in his gifts and in his praise. He had known she would love the ways in which Starkhaven was similar to Kirkwall, and that they would bring her pain; he had known she would love the differences and that those would ache, too. He had been so kind, always—even tonight, his long brown archer's hands tender as he'd touched her, his eyes unguarded and fond. Patient, as well, how patient he'd been with her. She'd made him so many promises.
She'd meant the promises when she'd made them. To leave Kirkwall had shattered her heart; she had bound up all the shards in Sebastian's letters, knowing he would see it, and she'd hoped—a nervous hope, hesitant, almost shy—that he might have been willing to help reshape them into a better whole. Hard work, but she could lay the foundation, could prepare herself for the doing. And then come striding into the middle of it with all the careful consideration of a slammed door had been Fenris—
Had been—Fenris—
"Oh, oh," murmured Orana, and Hawke realized she was crying.
"Oh, damn," she said, angrily dashing at her own cheeks, and she stumbled badly as she rose, sloshing water over the tub's lip. Orana caught her arm and steadied her, let her snap on the dressing gown without assistance, let her bury her face in her hands and sit down hard before a little vanity made of white oak, still soaking wet. "Damn, damn, damn—"
She could not stop crying. Angry sobs—furious—an agony—how could she have let this happen? How could she have done this to herself, to Sebastian—how could she have done this to Fenris? A good man who wanted nothing more than to fulfill his duty, who loved the prince like his brother and would die before knowingly wounding him. A fool of the first order, and cruel besides—
She felt a pressure on her shoulders. Orana had taken her in her arms. Such a slight little thing, sturdy as a tuft of dandelion seeds, and as she stood beside Hawke and embraced her she was as ancient and immovable as the mountain itself. Hawke clung to her arm, too swept away by grief to even think of shame, and cried until she could hardly breathe.
Someone knocked softly at the door. Orana said something low and they went away again, and the harping resumed.
"Hush," Orana said, like coaxing a bird to her hand. "Hush, now, my lady. Take a deep breath and feel it stretch; let it go. Good. Again, Your Highness. Again."
"I'm sorry," Hawke said wretchedly, accepting the proffered handkerchief. "I'm sorry, Orana. I swear I'm not usually this damp. It's just…"
"You are very sad," Orana offered. "Not here, I think," she said, her fingertips brushing black hair from Hawke's temple, dropping to her heart. "But here."
There was no strength to her voice. "Yes."
"I think I can guess."
"Please don't," Hawke said, and turned her face away.
Orana let her go, but the gentleness in her voice did not change. "You hid it well today. If, of course, I am right."
The snort was sharp, without humor. "From everyone but you?"
"I was a slave once, in another country. I could read the silent word in a glance or I would die." She held up her hand at Hawke's indrawn breath, shook her head. "It was long ago, Your Highness, and I have learned many things from it. Regardless, you are now my charge. Should I not shield you from what pain I can?"
She forced a laugh. "I'm not ashamed to admit the rose petals were a balm for the soul."
"That will please Roisin. I will tell her this." She folded Hawke's anxiously lifted fingers within her own. "This only, and no other. This promise I make to you, Your Highness."
"Promises are dangerous things, Orana, not to be made lightly."
"Yes, Your Highness." Orana drew her up from the vanity. "Come. Write your letters and sleep."
Hawke followed her through the far door into the suite's bedchamber. It was a beautiful room, draped in ivory and jade green, and all the wood was rich mahogany. A grand bed had been set against the far wall, four dark, carved posts spiring upwards, a delicate canopy of sheer silk crowning the winged headboard; a small fire burned brightly in the brown-stone hearth, though the room was not cold. Near the door stood an elegant writing desk with many drawers and nooks, and Orlitte had just placed atop it a sheaf of creamy paper and two fresh inkwells. She smiled, dropped a curtsey, and withdrew.
"I will wait in the next room until you are finished," Orana said.
Hawke eased into the slender chair, ran her fingers over the clean, crisp sheets. "You needn't wait. Truly. I haven't the faintest idea what I'm going to say. It could be hours."
"Yes," Orana said placidly, and in a few moments had loosely braided Hawke's hair and tied it off with a leather strip. She went into the next room and came back with the plate of crackers and cheese, with a fresh cordial of brandy, and set both beside her. "I will be just here, my lady."
Hawke caught her wrist. "Thank you, Orana."
She smiled, the dimple returning, and closed the door behind her.
—
Hawke was alone.
For the first time in four months—more—for the first time since her brother had brought potent Nevarran spirits to her rooms in Kirkwall and she and her friends had celebrated their goodbyes. She did not particularly enjoy solitude—the world always seemed less jovial when she had no one with which to laugh—but novelty had restored its shine, and for several minutes Hawke shut her eyes and reveled in the silence.
She could dance naked if she liked. She could whistle, crack her fingers, kick her heels idly against the wall—all of which made Fenris scowl when she did them too long—she could think of Prince Sebastian without wondering what her face revealed.
Or perhaps even of Fenris himself, she thought hopefully, but the instant his face rose in her mind her heart cracked clean in two and her eyes stung. She could not stand the idea of weeping again; she looked instead to the neat metal nib of her pen as she dipped it, the clear, crisp curve of each letter, the commitment of ink to page.
My very dear everyone,
Surprise! I'm alive! I understand there may have been some doubts of my general invincibility (for shame), but please let me assure you I am very well and safe in An Taigh Gheal. I admit to a few moments here and there where success seemed less than likely, but the gods and the winds alike favored us when all had gone bleak, and we found unexpected friends along the way. I have so much to tell you but I have not slept in a bed in four months, and I confess the down calls powerfully to me. I will write to you very soon with a full accounting of everything, and when I see you next I'm sure I'll manage an even fuller one as I remember each little piece. I am very eager to see you all.
For now, I will say only that Lirene should hire a better cobbler, and that I did what I could to keep Bethany's roses from ruin. I know how many hours you put into those stitches, dearest, and I swear, I tried. Don't despise me when you see them.
Both the captain and I made it safely, and Lady Merrill, though many others died in the ambush. Decimus betrayed us for Tevinter gold, along with others from Kirkwall and Starkhaven. I must add that throughout our travels Captain Fenris—
His name glinted in wet, black ink. She had shaped the letters strong, unflinching, a painful contrast to her heart; she shut her eyes and every fine trapping of her room faded to a stone cave, a steady rain, her hand on his chest and his eyes burning green.
She had felt his heart racing. She had seen the pulse jump in his throat, had felt his breath hitch as she leaned towards him. He had wanted so badly to kiss her—she'd seen it in his face, felt the mirrored echo of her own wish—and for just one precious instant she had allowed herself to forget—
His hand had shaken as she'd taken it this morning, as he'd passed her to Sebastian in the grand avenue before the palace. Every ounce of will she possessed had been needed to let him go, and she had not had the strength to look at him again after.
What else had she expected? What else had she hoped would happen when they reached this white city and its gleaming towers and its glowing, earnest prince? She had sworn oaths, had given Sebastian her binding word. So had Fenris, and the duties had not been dissimilar. She had looked down the road for both of them—all three of them—and gathered alongside it only a wealth of thorns. She set her jaw, threw back the brandy, and picked up her pen again.
Captain Fenris remained brave, honorable, and stalwart at every step of the journey. He is a good man and occasionally a kind one, and I could not have survived without him. Whatever reward you promised those who aided me—I know, Father, you must have proclaimed something of the sort—it should all pass to him.
Sebastian has received me with great kindness and patience. I am doing what I can to mimic his forbearance, though I confess it comes with some difficulty. Restrain your shock, how unseemly.
Please come as soon as you can. I miss you all badly. Take the fastest ship in the harbor and push it until the sails make the ropes scream and snap and the masts turn into great bent bows.
Give my love to Aveline and Anders. See if Evelina has found an apprenticeship for Walter yet. Tell Thrask to watch his dogs.
I love you all. I thought of you all so often—I love you so dearly, and I miss you. Come soon. Who knows what mortal peril I'll find myself in next week without you?
Affectionately, endearingly, alive-ly,
Hawke
Good enough. She sat back, blotted the page, and folded it. Not quite what she'd meant to write, but three pages of praise for the White Guard's captain would have raised more brows than she could assuage, and her chest still ached besides. Orana waited for her in the sitting room, as promised; she took the letter, smiling, and shooed Hawke back into the bedchamber.
Silver-haired Caitlin followed, quick and competent as she helped Hawke into a nightshirt and folded her at last under the thick covers. The sheets were fine, very soft; the pillow had silver feathers embroidered along the hem. "Good night, Your Highness," she said warmly, the sternness softening with her smile, and blew out all four candelabra as she left.
The room had suddenly grown still and dark. A breath of cool moonlight slipped in through the curtains here and there; the fire had been banked and the dying embers reflected gold on the carved ceiling. The bed was very soft. An Taigh Gheal, after all this time, and Prince Sebastian with it. Sebastian, who was prepared to love her if she would permit it. She turned to her side and shut her eyes against the pillow, let out a long, slow breath. Sebastian, she thought fiercely, and gentle archer's hands, and the bright unshaken blue of tourmaline.
In the end sleep came more swiftly than she expected; but when she dreamed that night it was only the sound of soft, steady rain outside a stony cave, a swordsman's calluses against her wrist, and the rhythm of a heartbeat beneath her hand.
—
end.
AN: This has possibly been my favorite fic I've ever written, and I'm grateful beyond words I've been able to share it with you. Please know I have read and cherished every comment, even the ones I missed replies to; it's been a tremendous comfort during some very difficult weeks to see the reactions and laughter and occasional gnashing of teeth roll in. Thank you for coming along with me on this silly, beautiful adventure!
And one last time, all my gratitude to Jade for her wonderful beta.