Chapter Text
Alena
From where she sat, Haven seemed far away, its gates firmly closed, the army’s camp obscured by a hill. The dock was old and half-rotted, sprawled over a frozen lake. It was uncomfortable. She never wanted to leave.
She could see the breach—or at least she could see the sickly green light it cast over the landscape, brighter than a full moon—but she’d only escape that by going back to Haven and locking herself inside. She couldn’t bear the thought. At least here the thing itself—the swirling, terrifying tear in the sky—was at her back.
She traced the journey home in her mind, as she had many times over the past day: a snowy hike east to the highway, then a lengthy but easy run north-east along the coast of Lake Calenhad and on to Portsmouth. A ship across the Waking Sea. The same way she had come.
But how could she leave such chaos behind her?
She squeezed her left hand into a fist. It didn’t hurt anymore, not precisely, not since Cassandra and Solas had dragged her through yesterday’s nightmare to thrust her hand towards the sky and stabilise the breach. But it buzzed incessantly, and she had the constant skin-crawling sensation that her body was no longer hers—that it had been colonised by a magic she did not understand and could not control.
When she turned, now, she saw shadowy corners at the edges of her vision. She felt phantom fingertips sliding over her hips, her waist, her shoulders. She felt herself trapped, the familiar cold tendrils of despair crawling up her spine.
Prepare her for Val Royeaux to face execution. Roderick, his eyes glimmering with hate; the Templars stepping towards her without a moment’s hesitation; Cassandra’s snapped order the only thing holding them back.
Alena stood. She’d wanted to run earlier and felt too exposed, certain that Leliana had spies trailing her and that the eyes of the lookout towers spaced out around Haven were fixed firmly on her. She didn’t care anymore. Let them think her mad. She went slow on the far side of the lake, where there was no more than a rough goat path through the snow. On the townward side, though, was a broad flat road. She went all out: arms pumping, feet heavier than she liked in knee-high leather boots but she was flying in the cold night air, and each step was a reminder that her body was her own.
She thought again of fleeing. Perhaps to Redcliffe and the rebels? Or perhaps she should flee home, perhaps Rogier and the others would understand the mark. She could come back to Haven, armed with knowledge, and close it with their help.
It was a pleasant fantasy; she let herself live in it for a while. But the Inquisition would follow her. She couldn’t outrun the Nightingale: who had somehow known Alena to be a Trevelyan despite the fact she’d been going by Dawson since the tower fell; who’d known Alena to be a mage despite the fact of her daggers and leather armour. Solas had determined the latter, the distant rational part of her knew, but Alena couldn’t help but attribute it to the spymaster. Leliana, all-knowing, would find her and her people and drag her back.
She circled the lake many times—here slowing, there speeding up—until her legs were burning with effort and her heart was too wrung out to ache.
Then, for the first time, as she turned her face towards the little cabin she’d been assigned in Haven, she let herself think about Cullen: the way his face had turned from disbelief to joy at the sight of her on the battlefield outside the Temple of Sacred Ashes; the relief that had flooded her own treacherous heart when she looked back; the easy, confident set of his shoulders as he gathered his soldiers about him before the final push into the temple. His soldiers, with their unmistakeable stances—relaxed but terribly alert, death held on a loose leash—of Templars in the circle, waiting for a mage to stray.
He'd made his choice, and he'd come south to join his comrades. She mustn't trust him. She'd survive this, as she had everything else. If she were careful.
She slipped in through Haven’s main gate, ignoring the respectful salutes of the women stationed there. This Herald business, too, was dangerous; she needed to plan for the day reverence tipped into disappointment that Alena was just another mortal woman, as lost and unholy as the worst of them.
And Maker, even without that absurd title, she was suddenly Lady Trevelyan again, the hated surname following her everywhere. Josephine, asking if her parents might support them, blinking at the vehemence of Alena’s “They won’t.”
Cullen was waiting at her door. She wasn’t surprised. She unlocked it and let him trail inside after her.
“Thank you for the flowers,” she said coolly, nodding towards the vase of snowdrops he’d left with a note by her sickbed.
“Alena,” he said, hovering by the door. “Would you like me to go? We can talk another—”
“Let’s talk now,” she said.
“Alright.” He leaned against the back of an armchair by the fireplace. Somebody had been in her room, lighting the fire and turning down the bed, leaving a bottle of wine on the mantle. It irritated Alena. It felt like her whole self had been scattered out across Haven for the assembled pilgrims to pick at; surely she could be allowed a small inviolable room of her own.
Still, she snatched up the bottle and poured a glass for herself and another for Cullen.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” he said as she handed him the glass.
She huffed. “I thought… well. I didn’t think this was what you’d choose.”
“What do you think I’ve chosen?” he said, voice still carefully mild, which irritated her further.
“The Templars.”
“No,” Cullen said. “I’ve left the order. But many of my soldiers are also former Templars. I can see why it must seem like—”
“Why the Inquisition, then?”
“I believed Divine Justinia wanted to make something better. I believe that Cassandra and Leliana want that, too.”
Alena took a long drink. “I’ve heard the sales pitch.”
“You don’t believe them?”
“You haven’t been briefed on my response yet?”
“I’d like to hear it from you.”
Another sip. “They say they want to close the Breach, wonderful. So do I. They say they want to make peace between the mages and the Templars, but there are two mages in this camp and neither of us were invited. Lots of Templars, though. I can’t help but draw conclusions.”
“I understand that,” Cullen murmured.
Alena closed her eyes. “Don’t be kind to me,” she said. “I’m trying to be angry and suspicious and a survivor.”
She heard him get to his feet. “Alright. If ever you want to talk, come find me. Goodnight, Alena.”
She felt like dirt when he was gone: ungrateful, rude, suspicious, unpleasant. It was for the best, probably, that he should see her for what she was. She swallowed the last of her wine, put the glass back on the mantle, and crawled fully dressed into bed.
Her dreams that night were a riot of painful memories and fearful imaginings: Cullen in her tiny room in the Wet Chain, murmuring I like you, wrapping a fist around her neck to squeeze; Roderick snapping the chains closed around her wrist; Cullen carving a jagged line into the flesh of her face, speaking with Robert’s voice (don’t need you pretty anymore); a mob baying for her blood; Val Royeaux for execution; the mark on her hand flaring back to life and consuming her.
Cullen
Forty hours, give or take. Forty hours that Alena had been back in his life—or at least that he’d been aware she was back (and oh, he couldn’t bear to think of the three days that she had lain unconscious and chained while he just shrugged his shoulders at Cassandra’s messages about her prisoner). She had reappeared like an amputated limb that was suddenly restored to him, her face reflecting back all the joy and relief that flooded him. Then she’d collapsed, and when she woke again it had all gone wrong.
Forty hours and then she’d left again, left for the Hinterlands the morning after that terrible conversation in her cabin, grim-faced and uncomfortable on a gentle roan pony the soldiers had found in a field by a burning farmhouse. He’d relived it many times since then, imagining how things might have gone if he’d stayed by her bedside after her assault on the breach. If he’d refused to be drawn away by the demands of training and supply lines and requisitions.He might have explained things to her: that he’d thought of her every day since they met; that he’d left the Templars, renounced lyrium; that he’d joined the Inquisition because he believed it offered him the chance to become a better man than the Chantry had made him. And, perhaps, to make the world safer for Alena and the people she loved.
Perhaps, hearing all that from him before Roderick could threaten her again with execution and Cassandra could tut impatiently at her doubts, she might have been able to catch her breath. Might have let him shoulder some of the weight that had been so unfairly thrust upon her.
Instead—Don’t be kind to me; I’m trying to be angry and suspicious and a survivor—she was alone.
Cassandra’s reports were spare: these rifts closed, those bandits routed, this many rebel supply caches taken for the refugees. Two small factions of mages and Templars had refused the temporary truce agreed upon for the Conclave and were attacking one another and any unfortunate civilian they came across. Alena and her party were whittling down the numbers of both groups. Cullen wasn’t sure which idea distressed him more: that she was facing Templars who hated her with such relentless venom that even a brief pause in their quest to purge the mages had been intolerable, or that she was forced to kill her own, however maddened they might have become after two years of war.
Cassandra’s detached analysis of Alena’s combat-worthiness—no defensive magic, inefficient and idiosyncratic bladework, far too reliant on her speed and agility, in urgent need of training, Cullen—stoked his fear. In his dreams they caught her, and he watched as a Templar hissed filth and slit her throat or a mage spat traitor and set her alight.
But the Inquisition marched relentlessly on and Cullen had no choice but to do the same. A few new recruits arrived each day—a trickle that would need to last for months before it made up for the men and women that had been lost to the explosion and its aftermath, but welcome nonetheless. All needed training and equipment and accommodation. He discarded the force structure he had developed prior to the Conclave and mapped out his army anew.
He tried not to think what would happen if she never returned. When he’d first agreed to join the Inquisition he’d known full well he’d be doing it without Alena—more, that by leaving the Free Marches he was extinguishing any chance of ever seeing her again. But now that she had so improbably reappeared in his life, it seemed an extraordinary hardship to continue on this quest if she should abandon it.
She won’t, he thought. She won’t leave as long as that thing on her palm is the only way to close the rifts. She stays where she’s needed. Guilt came hot on the heels of his relief.
He signed his name to the requisition list with so much force the quill tore through the parchment.
“Commander?” Rylen asked, more gently than Cullen liked.
“It’s fine,” Cullen said briskly. “If the quartermaster has a problem with it, send her to me. What else?”
“Nothing. So I thou—”
“Very good. Drills at dawn as usual and then please advi—”
“So I thought,” Rylen repeated, “we could go get a drink and you could tell me all about it.”
Cullen scowled.
Rylen grinned, an expression incongrous with his heavy brows and tattooed chin. “Come now, Commander. It’s absolutely crucial for my morale. We haven’t been for a drink since Kirkwall.”
Cullen cast about for any other demand on his time, but there was nothing to call him away. “Fine,” he groused, and let Rylen drag him off to the tavern.
It felt good to talk about it, he found. He’d gone back to the Gallows after his night with Alena with a vague lie about too much ale in the Hanged Man and lived for months after that with the constant sensation that perhaps she was in Kirkwall, watching him, timing her visits to Lonnie’s warehouse around his, without his ever admitting it to anyone. Now, Rylen offered a sympathetic ear. He chuckled at the appropriate moments, grimaced at others, and refrained from offering platitudinous advice.
“Maker,” he said instead, “quite the fucking mess.” And he waved for Flissa to bring another jug of ale to their table.