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"Lady Trevelyan, if you don't mind?" Revered Mother Philomela's voice was cold and smooth and chillingly correct, but Ren could hear the disapproval underneath it, loud and clear.
"Sure." She was deliberately careless and informal in response. Childish, she knew, and calculated to make things worse for her in the long run, but she was stuck here for the time being, powerless, and the only part of her life she had any control over was her mouth. She held the door for the Chantry contingent from Ostwick, standing there leaning back against the weight of the heavy block of wood while the silent robed Mothers and Sisters paraded through the doorway.
Several more hours of kneeling on the hard floor while the Chantry deliberated, the Conclave getting nowhere as far as she could tell, until it would be time to follow the Ostwick contingent back out through the heavy doors to their lodgings, where there would be the austere evening meal of bread and cheese and cider for the outcasts like Ren who were here to do the door-holding and the errand-running before collapsing on her small pallet. And then after a fitful night's sleep, she could get up and do it all over again tomorrow. And the day after that.
On the other hand, the alternative would be worse. If he hadn't sent her to the Chantry, her father would have insisted on setting up another arranged marriage for her. There was little doubt in Ren's mind that whoever he would have sold her to would have been worse than the mind-numbing boredom of the Conclave and the discomforts of being a Chantry lackey. Besides which, she suspected it would be easier to escape the Chantry than it would have been to run out on her father again.
Or at least she had thought as much until the Chantry hauled her out here to Haven, on the edge of nowhere, surrounded by fields of ice and rocks as far as the eye could see. If she were to run away from here, she'd freeze to death, or starve, before she managed to find civilization again. No, here she was and here she would stay until this interminable Conclave finally ground to a halt.
The Chantry members had finally all made it through the door. Ren nodded at the other lackey, an overly subservient girl from Nevarra who was firmly under Revered Mother Tatyana's thumb, and they closed the doors, slowly, so as not to make any noise. Just once, Ren wanted to let them slam and see the entire Conclave jump, but the consequences wouldn't have been worth the moment of enjoyment, so she followed the Nevarran girl to their post at the back of the room, where they would kneel on the cold floors until someone decided it was time to stop talking and take a break.
Ideally, the floors were hard and cold enough to keep them awake, so Ren had made it her goal to manage to fall asleep at some point, if only because it would annoy the Revered Mother so very much.
The droning voices went on and on. Theoretically, this Conclave was meant to bring about change … but no one seemed to really want change, unless it was exactly on their terms. So the voices were really nothing but meaningless noise.
About halfway through the morning, it appeared that something was off—the Divine hadn't arrived. One of the Grand Clerics whispered in the ear of a subordinate Revered Mother near her, and the Mother hurried toward the door. Revered Mother Philomela glanced pointedly at Ren, her eyes narrowed as if Ren should have anticipated the situation and already been on her feet to open the door.
At least it was something to do. Ren got up and opened the door; the Revered Mother hurried through without a glance in her direction. Then Ren closed the door, carefully and silently … from the outside. Philomela would hardly disrupt the proceedings to come after her, and the idea of the Revered Mother raging silently at Ren's insubordination more than made up for any punishment that might come Ren's way later.
Shoving her hands in her pockets, Ren considered the hallway, looking in both directions. Where would she be most likely to find something interesting she could pocket and sell later, when she finally got away from the Chantry and needed money?
It was hard to tell, so many closed doors in both directions. On a whim, she turned left.
The Iron Bull shambled out of his tent, still groggy from sleep. They had been celebrating at lunch. Not only had this morning's fishing contest brought in a particularly big haul—the Iron Bull had let Rocky win, making a big show of his disappointment at coming in second, which had made the dwarf happy—but the client from their most recent job had been so pleased with their work he had sent along several large casks of very fine ale. They had all eaten and drunk hugely, the Iron Bull most of all. After that, he had crawled into his tent for a long afternoon nap.
Looking up at the sky, he yawned and stretched. He must have slept harder than he thought, because he was having trouble clearing his vision. No matter how much he blinked, he couldn't get rid of a strange green haze over his eye.
Wait. When he looked away from the sky, the haze disappeared. It was only when he looked back—no, that wasn't a haze on his eye, and it wasn't a figment of his imagination. A piece of the sky was green. Almost as though it was broken. Cracked. Who or what had cracked the sky?
"Krem!" he roared. "Get your Vint ass over here!"
Normally, a call like that would have his second-in-command wandering over in his chief's direction as slowly as possible, just to needle the Iron Bull, but something in his tone must have sounded serious, because Krem appeared at his side almost instantly.
"You saw it, Chief?"
The Iron Bull bellowed, "You knew about this?"
"Yeah. I noticed it a little while ago. Some kind of … I don't know what it was. Just suddenly a piece of the sky was green."
"Krem. You knew that a green crack showed up in the sky and you didn't come wake me up?"
"I tried. You were out like someone had slugged you."
"Hmph." He prided himself on being more alert than that. He was getting sloppy, no two ways about it. Time to sharpen up. Whatever was going on, whatever had created that green streak, the Iron Bull's superiors in the Ben Hassrath were going to want to know what was happening. Possibly to take advantage of whatever it was for their own ends, almost certainly to gain information on the southern countries in the process, and the Iron Bull thought he might be the tool they would use in that endeavor. Hard to say, of course—the Ben Hassrath weren't always predictable—but better to be prepared than otherwise.
"You think it's some kind of explosion, like what happened in Kirkwall?"
"Maybe. I don't think Kirkwall left a tear in the sky, though. That's … a serious amount of firepower, if an explosion did that."
"Not your people, was it, Chief?"
The Iron Bull shook his head. "Anything's possible, but they didn't tell me, and it seems unlikely if they were going to want to start a war, they'd start it in southern Ferelden. Too hard to get troops down there without being seen."
"Still, though—explosion like that, big green thing in the sky, causes chaos, and chaos is good for the Qunari, isn't it?"
"Good thinking. Still … this doesn't look like us. It looks like …"
"Magic? Demons? Spirits?"
Not for the first time, the Iron Bull blessed his luck in finding this man in that seedy tavern long ago.. Krem's intelligence and understanding and his willingness to push the Iron Bull to think clearly at all angles of a problem were more than worth the eye the Iron Bull had lost recruiting him. "All of the above, Krem de la crème."
"Don't worry, Chief. I'll protect you."
"You? You couldn't protect me from a nug."
Krem chuckled. "Come on, Chief, I could manage a nug. A small one."
"We'll see about that." With a last glance at the break in the sky, they moved down the beach to spar. Might as well be in practice—new orders would be coming sooner or later. The Iron Bull hoped sooner. The green slash in the sky bothered him more than he wanted to admit, and he wanted to know more about what had happened, and what would come of it, and how to stop it.