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rose_in_winterCharacters: Fenris, Mage Female Hawke, Sebastian Vael (Fenris/f!Hawke/Sebastian)
Rating: NC-17
Contains: Canon-typical violence, explicit sex
Fic Wordcount: 117,000
Chapter Wordcount: 2600
Notes: Canon-divergent, ignoring most of Act 3. A thousand thanks tosenmut's Discord server for cheering and brainstorming and reactions and encouragement.
Beta: breadedsinner and MikWrites_InSpace
Summary: After the duel with the Arishok, Ariane Hawke looks around at the wreckage of her life in Kirkwall and asks herself: what is left for me here? As tensions increase between the Circle and the Templars, she turns to helping Sebastian retake Starkhaven. Meanwhile, she is trying to figure out how to love Fenris when he hates mages, and also definitely not looking at Sebastian's gorgeous eyes. Definitely not. Neither is Fenris. Sebastian is not looking back.
Definitely.
Canon divergence in which almost all of act 3 goes in the bin, and three damaged people try to find a way to live with each other and themselves, and maybe heal a bit.
Chapter index here.
The streets of Hightown, at least, were quickly cleared of any sign of the battle with the Qunari. The makeshift barricades had been removed, and the bodies as well. Soot and dried blood still marked the streets and buildings, but the mass of pewter clouds in the southwestern sky suggested that, too, would be cleared away before long.
Hawke made her way to the Chantry. Like Hightown, she had shed most of the physical marks of that day, barring a few bruises she hadn't considered important enough to heal. Also like Hightown, its residue clung to her.
Thus, the Chantry.
She pulled open the massive door and stepped inside. It was cool and dim, despite the masses of candles that reminded the faithful of Andraste's flames. The air was heavy with incense, prayer, and devotion. Soft, indistinct singing echoed. A sister greeted her, and Hawke bowed her head and dropped a silver into the box by the door.
She chose a bench for meditation and sat with her head bowed, watching the pattern of shadows dance and sway as currents of air moved the candle flames. Hawke was not especially religious, but whether she hewed to the Chant or not, it was a good place to think, and she had a lot of thinking to do.
Her desk was already piled high--higher than usual--with an influx of letters fawning, asking for favors, threatening her, offering her support. It was exceedingly tiresome. Even if Kirkwall would have accepted a mage as Viscount, she had no intention of taking the seat. For Andraste's sake, she was a farmer's daughter from Fereldan.
She chose to ignore that she was also a member of a Kirkwall noble house.
She heard a rustle of fabric, and glanced to her left to see Sebastian sitting beside her. Today he wore simple robes instead of his bright armor. He smiled quietly at her, and bent his head in prayer.
Hawke went back to staring at the floor, and the endless dance of restless shadows.
"Did you come for counsel?" Sebastian asked quietly, after a while had passed in silence.
Hawke opened her mouth to say no, then closed it again. "I'm not sure what I came for," she said. She sat back and leaned against the wall behind her. Sebastian sat up straighter, and watched her with quiet patience.
Hawke slowly turned the words around in her mind until they fell into place. "You've said you were the third son," she said, "and that as neither the heir nor the spare, you didn't really have a place. But I imagine that, in addition to teaching you archery, your grandfather told you something of his philosophy of rulership."
"He did," Sebastian agreed. "When I was young, I didn't care much for sitting quietly in his office drawing on scraps of paper while he worked, as my oldest brother did, but he'd talk to me while we were out hunting, or in the training ground. I asked mor equestions when I got older, and realized I was interested."
Hawke pictured a young Sebastian trying to sit still in a busy office, and smiled.
"And what brings this question?" Sebastian asked.
Hawke shrugged. "You should see my correspondence," she said. "I've got at least two letters from every House of even mediocre repute in Kirkwall, and a few from the houses of ill repute as well." He laughed, as she meant him to, and she continued. "I know I'm not fit to be what they want me to be, and I could never be what they all want since none of them want the same thing, but if I'm going to tell them no, I need to give them a reason they'll understand, or none of them will ever leave me alone. And none of them would understand simply not wanting it."
"They think you want it because they do," Sebastian agreed.
"Exactly." Hawke looked sideways at him.
"Why don't you want it?"
She considered sticking her tongue out at him for making her actually address the question, but it seemed rude to do that here in a way it didn't when they were hiking along the Wounded Coast. "Tell me honestly, Sebastian, would anyone accept a mage in that seat?"
"Anyone?" His lips quirked in a smile. "I'm sure you could find at least one. I'm quite sure Merrill or Varric would endorse you."
"That is not what I meant." Hawke remembered where she was, and moderated her volume.
"And it isn't actually your reason," he replied. "If you wanted the seat, you'd find a way to make people want you in it."
She thought about their previous conversations about the seat waiting for him in Starkhaven--or not waiting, as the case might be. Yet for all he called himself a man of the cloth, she did not think he was so very set on it as he claimed.
"Would you want it?"
"It's not mine to want." He paused. "You haven't answered the question."
Perceptive friends were a pain in the ass.
She huffed out a sigh. A woman passing by gave her a strange look. If Hawke had a copper for every time someone gave her a strange look, she could fund Aveline's guardsmen for a year. Or do something more interesting. When she spoke, however, it was with the gravity the situation demanded. "I have no right to make decisions for anyone else," she said. "A ruler needs to keep her people safe, as best she can; she needs to protect them against threats internal and external, and see to it that they have what they need." She thought of Viscount Dumar, the lines of weariness and worry carved deep in his cheeks and around his eyes. She thought of his terrible choices, the thin line he walked between his love for his son and the requirements of his position. "I couldn't keep my little sister safe," she continued, and tried to steady her voice when it cracked, "or my mother. I couldn't help my father, either. If you want a reason why I shouldn't sit in that building, there you have it."
Sebastian considered that for long enough that she thought he wouldn't answer her. Then he shifted. "I think you would have liked my grandfather," he said at last. "I'm certain he would have liked you."
She didn't know what to do with that information. "You said once that you didn't think it mattered to the smallfolk whose arse was in a seat so long as the harvest came in and their lives went on," she said eventually, fiddling with the skirt of her robe. "Maybe not to them, but it would matter to me."
He laughed, short and surprised, and cut himself off when a sister glanced at them. "I did say that," he admitted, and paused. Hawke could practically hear his mental scales creaking as he balanced more words against some unknown measure. "I think that's a discussion for another time," he said. "We aren't speaking of my throne, but of Kirkwall's."
Hawke closed her eyes and breathed deep. "I'd like to run away," she murmured.
"No, you wouldn't." Despite the words, his tone was warm and calm. "You'd like to set down the weight you carry a while."
This time she did shove him, albeit lightly. "Stop being right," she complained.
"I'm glad you find some use in my counsel," he said lightly, then turned more serious. "Decisions such as these aren't made overnight, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. You don't have to know today. You don't even have to know next week. And even if you did know, and gave them the answers they seek, nothing would come of it immediately."
"I don't like not having the answers," she said, and she didn't even like having admitted it aloud.
"Are you the Maker, then, to know everything?" he teased her.
"I would never lose my shoes again," she said gravely. In truth, though, she would like to know--not everything, that would be terrible since there would be no new things to discover, but maybe why the Maker made mages. And why He seemed to want them reviled.
But that wasn't a question she could ask Sebastian--at least, not with any expectation of an answer that wouldn't make her angry with its vagueness or sad at its weight. Instead, she pushed herself to her feet. "Thank you," she said, all seriousness. "I still don't know what to do, but...thanks for the talk."
"I can't tell you what to do, and wouldn't if I could," Sebastian said.
"I don't believe that," she said.
He half-smiled. "I know better than to tell you, I suppose." He paused. "Besides, you'd only do the opposite."
"I did not come here for you to insult me," she complained, at least half serious.
He smiled. "Go in the light of the Maker, Hawke."
"And you as well." She touched his shoulder lightly before she turned away.
She left the Chantry and wandered Hightown, stopping in the markets, but people kept coming up to greet her as the Champion, and it made her nervous. So she escaped to Lowtown and the Hanged Man, where people still might recognize her, but they would respect Varric when he told them to sod off.
Speak of the dwarf, he was holding court at his usual table, though he scattered them when he caught sight of her, and signaled Nora for more ale. Hawke dropped into the chair next to him and drank half the mug at once. Varric raised an eyebrow. "Life as the Champion not what you expected?" he asked.
"You say that like I had any plans for this to happen," Hawke said, and drank more ale, not because she wanted it but because it was there.
"Hawke said grumpily," Varric teased, then held up a hand when she snapped her head up to pin him with her worst glare. "Sorry. In poor taste." He leaned back in his chair. "So?"
"So every noble house in Kirkwall either wants to kill me, set me on the throne, drive me out of town, or buy me. I think two of them also offered marriage."
Varric nodded. "The players change, but the game doesn't."
"That is not encouraging."
"Hawke." He leaned forward, jewelry glinting. "People know you get the job done, and as far as they can see, you just single-handedly solved a problem that has plagued the city for four years--because the stylish dwarven crossbow wielder apparently was too short to register for them, but never mind that--and the worst thing most people can say about you is that you're a mage. Of course they see you as a fit for the very large job that has just opened up."
"Ah, yes," Hawke said, "magic, that noted qualifying trait for any candidate in fucking Kirkwall."
Varric shrugged. "What do you want me to do? Circulate a new issue of Hard in Hightown guaranteed to set the scandalmongers on you? Tell you who can be bribed to leave you alone? Help you fake your death and escape the city?" He shrugged again. "If you don't want to be treated as a hero, you might need to be a little less heroic."
She opened and closed her mouth twice, trying to find an effective counter-argument. Assistance came from the most unlikely quarter of all: the Carta.
There was a shift in the general mood of the Hanged Man whenever specific kinds of trouble walked in. Those kinds included Hawke and most of her friends, but there were other flavors, too. Hawke felt the currents change, heard the sudden drop and then rise in the background chatter. She turned her head and saw four dwarves, fully armored and carrying twin axes. She didn't have to see the heraldry to know who they were, at least conceptually. She shifted her chair so she could see the door, sliding her hand through the pocket slit in her robe to the dagger she wore strapped to her leg when a staff was inconvenient. She heard the quiet click that meant Varric was arming Bianca.
The Carta members looked around, and then started for Varric's table. He cursed very quietly and creatively behind her. The Hanged Man's patrons knew what was coming, and they made very certain to be anywhere but in the Carta's way. The smarter ones headed for the door. Nora tucked herself behind the bar. Some of the less clever ones clustered in corners, making bets.
Hawke braced herself, even as she mentally ran through a list of things she'd done recently to piss the Carta off, but she came up blank.
She expected them to tell her why they were after her--Carta power relied at least in part on people knowing why they showed up to break heads, otherwise it wasn't an effective deterrent--but instead the lead dwarf drew her axes and lunged. Hawke tumbled backwards off her chair and came up with her dagger in her hand, even as a trio of neatly placed crossbow bolts sprouted from the dwarf's throat.
After that, it was chaos. Since the cat was well and truly out of the bag, Hawke had options other than her dagger, but she didn't want to burn the entire bar down, so she stuck to thinly targeted spears of ice and a paralyzing glyph, with Varric and Bianca methodically knocking down the dwarves she had paralyzed.
It didn't take long to handle the four Carta, even with just two of them, and they did it in a satisfyingly tidy manner. Hawke heard the clink of coins changing hands from the gamblers as she bent to check the bodies. After a cursory search, they had nothing on them that showed why they would have come after her. She did find scraps of bloodied paper in their pockets with a constellation drawn on them--she thought it might have been Silentir, the constellation of Silence. Odd that dwarves, even casteless surfacers, would care so much about the stars.
She helped Varric drag the corpses out to the alley--it was only polite to clean up her own mess--and then returned to the Hanged Man, where she finished the last swallow of the mug of ale and looked at Varric, who was unusually quiet.
"Life's never dull with you around, Hawke," he said when he noticed.
She hesitated. "I think you have better contacts than I do for finding out why they attacked us," she said slowly, "but I actually came here to ask you about something else."
"Not just for my political advice?" Varric grinned.
Hawke rolled her eyes, but the question was surprisingly hard to ask. "I wondered...." She blew out a long breath and reminded herself that midafternoon when the Carta was trying to kill her was a bad time to drink hard liquor. "I'd like to see if we can find Isabela."
Varric nodded, looking unsurprised. "I've got some queries out. I'll let you know if there's anything we can follow up on."
"All right." Hawke sighed and pushed herself to her feet. "I've had enough excitement for one day." She detoured by the bar to hand over some extra coppers for the cleanup, and then headed back to Hightown, more unsettled than she'd been when she left the house this morning.
Chapter Three
Rating: NC-17
Contains: Canon-typical violence, explicit sex
Fic Wordcount: 117,000
Chapter Wordcount: 2600
Notes: Canon-divergent, ignoring most of Act 3. A thousand thanks to
senmut's Discord server for cheering and brainstorming and reactions and encouragement.Beta: breadedsinner and MikWrites_InSpace
Summary: After the duel with the Arishok, Ariane Hawke looks around at the wreckage of her life in Kirkwall and asks herself: what is left for me here? As tensions increase between the Circle and the Templars, she turns to helping Sebastian retake Starkhaven. Meanwhile, she is trying to figure out how to love Fenris when he hates mages, and also definitely not looking at Sebastian's gorgeous eyes. Definitely not. Neither is Fenris. Sebastian is not looking back.
Definitely.
Canon divergence in which almost all of act 3 goes in the bin, and three damaged people try to find a way to live with each other and themselves, and maybe heal a bit.
Chapter index here.
The streets of Hightown, at least, were quickly cleared of any sign of the battle with the Qunari. The makeshift barricades had been removed, and the bodies as well. Soot and dried blood still marked the streets and buildings, but the mass of pewter clouds in the southwestern sky suggested that, too, would be cleared away before long.
Hawke made her way to the Chantry. Like Hightown, she had shed most of the physical marks of that day, barring a few bruises she hadn't considered important enough to heal. Also like Hightown, its residue clung to her.
Thus, the Chantry.
She pulled open the massive door and stepped inside. It was cool and dim, despite the masses of candles that reminded the faithful of Andraste's flames. The air was heavy with incense, prayer, and devotion. Soft, indistinct singing echoed. A sister greeted her, and Hawke bowed her head and dropped a silver into the box by the door.
She chose a bench for meditation and sat with her head bowed, watching the pattern of shadows dance and sway as currents of air moved the candle flames. Hawke was not especially religious, but whether she hewed to the Chant or not, it was a good place to think, and she had a lot of thinking to do.
Her desk was already piled high--higher than usual--with an influx of letters fawning, asking for favors, threatening her, offering her support. It was exceedingly tiresome. Even if Kirkwall would have accepted a mage as Viscount, she had no intention of taking the seat. For Andraste's sake, she was a farmer's daughter from Fereldan.
She chose to ignore that she was also a member of a Kirkwall noble house.
She heard a rustle of fabric, and glanced to her left to see Sebastian sitting beside her. Today he wore simple robes instead of his bright armor. He smiled quietly at her, and bent his head in prayer.
Hawke went back to staring at the floor, and the endless dance of restless shadows.
"Did you come for counsel?" Sebastian asked quietly, after a while had passed in silence.
Hawke opened her mouth to say no, then closed it again. "I'm not sure what I came for," she said. She sat back and leaned against the wall behind her. Sebastian sat up straighter, and watched her with quiet patience.
Hawke slowly turned the words around in her mind until they fell into place. "You've said you were the third son," she said, "and that as neither the heir nor the spare, you didn't really have a place. But I imagine that, in addition to teaching you archery, your grandfather told you something of his philosophy of rulership."
"He did," Sebastian agreed. "When I was young, I didn't care much for sitting quietly in his office drawing on scraps of paper while he worked, as my oldest brother did, but he'd talk to me while we were out hunting, or in the training ground. I asked mor equestions when I got older, and realized I was interested."
Hawke pictured a young Sebastian trying to sit still in a busy office, and smiled.
"And what brings this question?" Sebastian asked.
Hawke shrugged. "You should see my correspondence," she said. "I've got at least two letters from every House of even mediocre repute in Kirkwall, and a few from the houses of ill repute as well." He laughed, as she meant him to, and she continued. "I know I'm not fit to be what they want me to be, and I could never be what they all want since none of them want the same thing, but if I'm going to tell them no, I need to give them a reason they'll understand, or none of them will ever leave me alone. And none of them would understand simply not wanting it."
"They think you want it because they do," Sebastian agreed.
"Exactly." Hawke looked sideways at him.
"Why don't you want it?"
She considered sticking her tongue out at him for making her actually address the question, but it seemed rude to do that here in a way it didn't when they were hiking along the Wounded Coast. "Tell me honestly, Sebastian, would anyone accept a mage in that seat?"
"Anyone?" His lips quirked in a smile. "I'm sure you could find at least one. I'm quite sure Merrill or Varric would endorse you."
"That is not what I meant." Hawke remembered where she was, and moderated her volume.
"And it isn't actually your reason," he replied. "If you wanted the seat, you'd find a way to make people want you in it."
She thought about their previous conversations about the seat waiting for him in Starkhaven--or not waiting, as the case might be. Yet for all he called himself a man of the cloth, she did not think he was so very set on it as he claimed.
"Would you want it?"
"It's not mine to want." He paused. "You haven't answered the question."
Perceptive friends were a pain in the ass.
She huffed out a sigh. A woman passing by gave her a strange look. If Hawke had a copper for every time someone gave her a strange look, she could fund Aveline's guardsmen for a year. Or do something more interesting. When she spoke, however, it was with the gravity the situation demanded. "I have no right to make decisions for anyone else," she said. "A ruler needs to keep her people safe, as best she can; she needs to protect them against threats internal and external, and see to it that they have what they need." She thought of Viscount Dumar, the lines of weariness and worry carved deep in his cheeks and around his eyes. She thought of his terrible choices, the thin line he walked between his love for his son and the requirements of his position. "I couldn't keep my little sister safe," she continued, and tried to steady her voice when it cracked, "or my mother. I couldn't help my father, either. If you want a reason why I shouldn't sit in that building, there you have it."
Sebastian considered that for long enough that she thought he wouldn't answer her. Then he shifted. "I think you would have liked my grandfather," he said at last. "I'm certain he would have liked you."
She didn't know what to do with that information. "You said once that you didn't think it mattered to the smallfolk whose arse was in a seat so long as the harvest came in and their lives went on," she said eventually, fiddling with the skirt of her robe. "Maybe not to them, but it would matter to me."
He laughed, short and surprised, and cut himself off when a sister glanced at them. "I did say that," he admitted, and paused. Hawke could practically hear his mental scales creaking as he balanced more words against some unknown measure. "I think that's a discussion for another time," he said. "We aren't speaking of my throne, but of Kirkwall's."
Hawke closed her eyes and breathed deep. "I'd like to run away," she murmured.
"No, you wouldn't." Despite the words, his tone was warm and calm. "You'd like to set down the weight you carry a while."
This time she did shove him, albeit lightly. "Stop being right," she complained.
"I'm glad you find some use in my counsel," he said lightly, then turned more serious. "Decisions such as these aren't made overnight, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. You don't have to know today. You don't even have to know next week. And even if you did know, and gave them the answers they seek, nothing would come of it immediately."
"I don't like not having the answers," she said, and she didn't even like having admitted it aloud.
"Are you the Maker, then, to know everything?" he teased her.
"I would never lose my shoes again," she said gravely. In truth, though, she would like to know--not everything, that would be terrible since there would be no new things to discover, but maybe why the Maker made mages. And why He seemed to want them reviled.
But that wasn't a question she could ask Sebastian--at least, not with any expectation of an answer that wouldn't make her angry with its vagueness or sad at its weight. Instead, she pushed herself to her feet. "Thank you," she said, all seriousness. "I still don't know what to do, but...thanks for the talk."
"I can't tell you what to do, and wouldn't if I could," Sebastian said.
"I don't believe that," she said.
He half-smiled. "I know better than to tell you, I suppose." He paused. "Besides, you'd only do the opposite."
"I did not come here for you to insult me," she complained, at least half serious.
He smiled. "Go in the light of the Maker, Hawke."
"And you as well." She touched his shoulder lightly before she turned away.
She left the Chantry and wandered Hightown, stopping in the markets, but people kept coming up to greet her as the Champion, and it made her nervous. So she escaped to Lowtown and the Hanged Man, where people still might recognize her, but they would respect Varric when he told them to sod off.
Speak of the dwarf, he was holding court at his usual table, though he scattered them when he caught sight of her, and signaled Nora for more ale. Hawke dropped into the chair next to him and drank half the mug at once. Varric raised an eyebrow. "Life as the Champion not what you expected?" he asked.
"You say that like I had any plans for this to happen," Hawke said, and drank more ale, not because she wanted it but because it was there.
"Hawke said grumpily," Varric teased, then held up a hand when she snapped her head up to pin him with her worst glare. "Sorry. In poor taste." He leaned back in his chair. "So?"
"So every noble house in Kirkwall either wants to kill me, set me on the throne, drive me out of town, or buy me. I think two of them also offered marriage."
Varric nodded. "The players change, but the game doesn't."
"That is not encouraging."
"Hawke." He leaned forward, jewelry glinting. "People know you get the job done, and as far as they can see, you just single-handedly solved a problem that has plagued the city for four years--because the stylish dwarven crossbow wielder apparently was too short to register for them, but never mind that--and the worst thing most people can say about you is that you're a mage. Of course they see you as a fit for the very large job that has just opened up."
"Ah, yes," Hawke said, "magic, that noted qualifying trait for any candidate in fucking Kirkwall."
Varric shrugged. "What do you want me to do? Circulate a new issue of Hard in Hightown guaranteed to set the scandalmongers on you? Tell you who can be bribed to leave you alone? Help you fake your death and escape the city?" He shrugged again. "If you don't want to be treated as a hero, you might need to be a little less heroic."
She opened and closed her mouth twice, trying to find an effective counter-argument. Assistance came from the most unlikely quarter of all: the Carta.
There was a shift in the general mood of the Hanged Man whenever specific kinds of trouble walked in. Those kinds included Hawke and most of her friends, but there were other flavors, too. Hawke felt the currents change, heard the sudden drop and then rise in the background chatter. She turned her head and saw four dwarves, fully armored and carrying twin axes. She didn't have to see the heraldry to know who they were, at least conceptually. She shifted her chair so she could see the door, sliding her hand through the pocket slit in her robe to the dagger she wore strapped to her leg when a staff was inconvenient. She heard the quiet click that meant Varric was arming Bianca.
The Carta members looked around, and then started for Varric's table. He cursed very quietly and creatively behind her. The Hanged Man's patrons knew what was coming, and they made very certain to be anywhere but in the Carta's way. The smarter ones headed for the door. Nora tucked herself behind the bar. Some of the less clever ones clustered in corners, making bets.
Hawke braced herself, even as she mentally ran through a list of things she'd done recently to piss the Carta off, but she came up blank.
She expected them to tell her why they were after her--Carta power relied at least in part on people knowing why they showed up to break heads, otherwise it wasn't an effective deterrent--but instead the lead dwarf drew her axes and lunged. Hawke tumbled backwards off her chair and came up with her dagger in her hand, even as a trio of neatly placed crossbow bolts sprouted from the dwarf's throat.
After that, it was chaos. Since the cat was well and truly out of the bag, Hawke had options other than her dagger, but she didn't want to burn the entire bar down, so she stuck to thinly targeted spears of ice and a paralyzing glyph, with Varric and Bianca methodically knocking down the dwarves she had paralyzed.
It didn't take long to handle the four Carta, even with just two of them, and they did it in a satisfyingly tidy manner. Hawke heard the clink of coins changing hands from the gamblers as she bent to check the bodies. After a cursory search, they had nothing on them that showed why they would have come after her. She did find scraps of bloodied paper in their pockets with a constellation drawn on them--she thought it might have been Silentir, the constellation of Silence. Odd that dwarves, even casteless surfacers, would care so much about the stars.
She helped Varric drag the corpses out to the alley--it was only polite to clean up her own mess--and then returned to the Hanged Man, where she finished the last swallow of the mug of ale and looked at Varric, who was unusually quiet.
"Life's never dull with you around, Hawke," he said when he noticed.
She hesitated. "I think you have better contacts than I do for finding out why they attacked us," she said slowly, "but I actually came here to ask you about something else."
"Not just for my political advice?" Varric grinned.
Hawke rolled her eyes, but the question was surprisingly hard to ask. "I wondered...." She blew out a long breath and reminded herself that midafternoon when the Carta was trying to kill her was a bad time to drink hard liquor. "I'd like to see if we can find Isabela."
Varric nodded, looking unsurprised. "I've got some queries out. I'll let you know if there's anything we can follow up on."
"All right." Hawke sighed and pushed herself to her feet. "I've had enough excitement for one day." She detoured by the bar to hand over some extra coppers for the cleanup, and then headed back to Hightown, more unsettled than she'd been when she left the house this morning.
Chapter Three