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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:
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.
Hawke let the door click quietly closed behind her and took a deep breath of the morning air--damp with mist and the scent of the sea. Kirkwall was awake and moving, but in Hightown the bustle was muted.
She hadn't even reached the end of her block when she realized there was someone following her. He was trying to be sneaky about it, but he'd been leaning against her neighbor's fence, and there weren't enough people on this street for him to hide. Instead of turning left to Fenris's mansion, she paused and beckoned to the boys who clustered at the corner, ready to deliver messages, packages, or letters. The one who hurried over was a Ferelden lad named Rohan, who had run errands for her before. She slipped him three silver coins. "Tell Fenris to meet me at the Chantry," she said, close to his ear so her voice wouldn't carry.
He nodded and took off at a run. Hawke continued on her way, unhurried, her shoulders drawing tighter as she moved and the stranger followed her. He didn't look Antivan, but not all Crows did. If she had to guess, she'd put her coin on Free Marcher. Still, she kept to the wider streets, where she had space to maneuver and guardsmen would be on duty. The stranger kept his distance, close enough to keep her in sight and far enough that it would look strange if she confronted him.
Fenris joined her a few streets away from the Chantry. "You have company," he said under cover of a loud dispute between footmen wearing different sets of livery.
"I know. It's why I didn't actually go to your house." Some of the tension left her knowing that she wouldn't fight alone if it came to that--and was replaced by worry for him. "What part of 'at the Chantry--'"
"I was on my way there," he said. "But there are only so many ways to get there from where I started, and I noticed him following you."
"I can defend myself on occasion."
"Hawke." She could almost hear his teeth grinding.
"I'm sorry."
His glance spoke volumes of his disbelief, but he let it go. They walked in companionable silence.
Sebastian was on duty at the Chanter's Board, and his face lit with a warm smile when he saw them approach. "Greetings, Hawke, Fenris."
"Any chance you can trade off duties?" Hawke asked lightly. "We've got a meeting."
"Ah, I was just finishing here," Sebastian said. He tacked two more sheets of foolscap to the board and tucked away the hammer and nails in a little wooden box on the side. "You heard back, then?"
"He would like to meet us at our earliest convenience." She swiveled and started off. There was a cart selling fresh pastries at the edge of the square, and she stopped to buy some for all of them.
"Hawke, I don't like to alarm you," Sebastian began.
"The man in black? Yes, I know." Hawke handed him the apple-filled pastry. Fenris got his preferred lemon cream, and she kept the cranberry and orange for herself. "He was waiting outside my house this morning." She bit into her pastry and sighed happily, stepping aside to let others approach the cart. Their follower was forced to dawdle at a cart offering incense and candles to the faithful visiting the Chantry, or else stand out even more loitering in the middle of the street. "He hasn't tried to stab me yet," she added, and took another bite.
Sebastian gave her a reproachful look.
"Well, I can't start a fight with a stranger for no reason in the middle of Hightown," she said when he was safely occupied with a mouthful of pastry.
"Yes, you've certainly never done that before," Fenris said.
"I absolutely had a reason each of those times," she said. "Usually involving a weapon pointed at me." She did not mention that very often he and his sword had been striking before she could even shape a spell.
"I didn't say to start a fight," Sebastian pointed out, having finished with his bite of food.
"That's good, because Aveline would disapprove." Hawke finished her breakfast, and leaned against the wall behind her, watching people approach and leave the Chantry. Several of the ones who passed them greeted Sebastian by name. He seemed to know them all, and she wondered if he would try to bring the same personal and personable knowledge to ruling Starkhaven.
By the time Fenris and Sebastian had finished their food, their shadow had been corralled into forking over coin for incense he probably didn't need, which amused her immensely. Served him right, and the woman who ran the incense cart was lovely and had four children at home to feed.
They resumed their walk, and soon enough arrived at the mansion once more. The butler led them to the same sitting room. De Telvignon was already seated in the larger chair, presumably in an effort to keep Hawke from claiming the seat again. He looked rather pale and unwell. Hawke looked around the room for threats, not bothering to be subtle about it. Fenris remained by the door, which he propped open with the iron weight kept nearby for such purposes. The butler, lingering outside, strolled out of view. Hawke would have bet ten sovereigns he went exactly far enough to not be seen and continued to listen avidly.
"Serah Hawke," their host said faintly. "Welcome."
Hawke did not take the seat he offered. She pulled the reliquary from her knapsack and held it in her hands so that the morning light glinted off it. Sebastian stood with his back to the window, watching both of them, and with a clear view of the door in case anyone tried to sneak up on Fenris, who was doing him the same favor. They were all very well-observed. "I have questions for you," Hawke said after letting the silence linger long enough for a fresh bead of sweat to appear on de Telvignon's forehead. "If your answers are acceptable, you get this and we all leave here contented."
He swallowed hard. "Questions, Serah?"
She thought she'd liked it better when he called her Champion, which fact she did not like at all. "Questions," she agreed. "Let's start with when you knew your daughter had run away, rather than being kidnapped."
"What?" His attempt to feign surprise was worse than Merrill's attempts to bluff at Wicked Grace.
"That's one answer I dislike," Hawke said. "There is an upper limit to my patience. I don't suggest breaching it." She smiled thinly. "Question number two. Who paid you to tell the Crows where we would be?" When he worked his mouth rather than speaking, she sighed. "I've never seen an Orlesian so quiet."
"H-how did you know?" he stammered.
"It beggars belief that even Antivan Crows would find me in a place the size of the Planasene without having some idea of where to look--particularly since they would normally expect to find me in Kirkwall," she explained patiently. "Therefore, someone told them. Since only four people knew where I was going and two of them were with me, that leaves you."
He had all but crumbled in on himself. "Cathleen Ovlin," he mumbled. "She's a Starkhaven noblewoman. I--I had some debts in Orlais and she bought them up. It wasn't about you. She said you'd have someone with you and she wanted him dead."
Hawke raised an eyebrow. "There were two Crows with two separate contracts," she prompted.
"I swear on Andraste's ashes that I only knew about one," he protested. "Please, Champion, have mercy."
He was back to calling her Champion, which was interesting. Hawke tilted the reliquary and watched the reflected light dance on the ceiling. "Lady Clarice does not choose to return to your dubious protection," she said. "She sends this with her compliments."
His eyes fixed on it. Hawke tapped the side of the box with her fingernails and he looked up at her--she wasn't tall, but with him sitting, she was tall enough. "You can have it back if you write a note to Lady Merinfort--to be delivered by me--asserting that her favor to you is repaid." Hawke let her smile widen. "Of course, there are alternatives, but I don't think you'll enjoy them." She thought, distantly, that she did not much care for the ease with which she'd used her position--and reputation--to threaten him, but she cared less for the fact that he'd helped someone try to assassinate Sebastian.
She'd heard of the Great Game in Orlais, and she was forced to conclude that one reason this man was in Kirkwall was that he was abysmally bad at it. He did, however, appear to recognize when the only option left to him was to fold. He rose from his seat and went to the escritoire, where he hurriedly drafted a note. He approached her, after a fashion, holding the letter out at the full reach of his arm. She couldn't quite reach it from where she stood, but she could read it if she squinted.
Dear Lady Merinfort,
Let this serve as notice that Serah Hawke has completed my request and accordingly, your favor to me is repaid.
Edouard de Telvignon
"Seal it," she said, and he hurried to do so. He set it down carefully on the table near the door; Fenris picked it up. Hawke started to set the reliquary down on the chair he'd meant for her, but it was dusty in a way that gave her pause--in distinct contrast to the rest of the room. Instead, she walked over to the chair he'd used and set it there.
"I hope I never see you again," she told him honestly, and then she and her companions left him standing there, panting.
The butler, as she had anticipated, was lurking a few steps aside from the door. She looked toward him. "Wear a damp cloth over your nose and mouth when he asks you to move that chair," she advised. "It'll keep you from breathing in too much."
The butler's mouth dropped open, and then he nodded, his expression tightening. As they saw themselves out, de Telvignon shouted for the butler to come remove the chair, and it was the kind of occasion where Hawke would have preferred not to be right.
"What was that about?" Fenris asked, when they were outside and the door had shut behind them.
"The chair was awfully dusty for being in a room that clean," Hawke said. "I don't know poisons well, but given the Crows, I made an assumption."
Sebastian hissed in a breath. "And you warned the butler because he wouldn't."
"I hope the butler finds another job soon," Hawke said, in lieu of acknowledgment.
Fenris frowned. "Even a magister wouldn't be so careless with a slave in that position," he said. "Why would he do it to a servant who can leave?"
"'Terrible people with power' is not a class of person exclusively made up of mages," Hawke answered.
His frown deepened, but he didn't say anything more.
The man who'd followed them earlier was still lingering outside the mansion. Hawke pushed down the temptation to go start a confrontation right now--the thrumming awareness and energy of having just dodged one kind of threat and solved one kind of problem was pushing her to make bad decisions, but she would not let it master her. Instead, she left Sebastian at the Chantry, detoured past Lady Merinfort's home to drop off the letter that would free her from that particular agreement, and then Fenris accompanied her back home. He went to the library to practice his reading, and Hawke steeled herself to tackle the pile of letters she'd abandoned the day before.
The first one she picked up was from the First Enchanter. Just the thought of having to embroil herself further in the ongoing war between him and Meredith made her tired. As she unfolded it, one of the candle sconces above her desk flickered out in the draft as Orana came in from the kitchen with a tray of tea. The flickering candlelight of the remaining candle half illuminated the letter--and Hawke saw something hideously, gut-wrenchingly familiar in the slanted scrawl and the over-decorated O of the First Enchanter's signature. She stumbled out of her chair and bolted into the library, narrowly avoiding a very startled Orana.
"Hawke? What is it?" Fenris set his book aside as she dashed to the far corner of the library.
She'd left those documents on a shelf too high for her to reach. Stupidly, she jumped and grabbed at the shelf, to no avail. Fenris appeared almost silently at her side with the stepstool that she used for those higher shelves. She muttered a distracted thanks as she climbed it and dragged down the plain wooden box.
She could tell Fenris was worried by how he hovered instead of standing back, but she couldn't think about that now. She wrenched the top off and scattered the letters of sympathy--many perfunctory or sycophantic, and several very genuine ones from her mother's friends--until she came to the leather folder at the bottom. Inside were the documents she'd shoved willy-nilly into her bag during the assault on the foundry where Quentin kept his workshop. She'd made some attempt to smooth them out without reading them again after. She wasn't even really sure why she'd kept them. Something had nagged at her about it, but she hadn't been able to think about it then, and told herself she'd handle it later--before promptly shoving it in a closed box she kept on a shelf she couldn't see in a part of the library she didn't use, in an excellent example of her capacity to deceive herself.
She found the note she wanted, written on rough foolscap rather than the fine parchment of the new letter from the First Enchanter. Leaving everything else scattered on the floor, she hurried back to her desk and laid the note next to the letter.
Nausea rose in her throat as her eyes consumed the note once again.
My dear friend,
I have obtained the books you requested. I'll leave them at our usual hiding spot. Please collect them as soon as possible. I would hate to see them in the wrong hands!
Your last letter was fascinating! You have proven me wrong, once again, by doing the impossible. I shouldn't have doubted your resolve, and I hope you will keep me apprised of further progress.
Your friend and colleague,
O
The new letter was less hurriedly written, clearly a fair copy of something drafted elsewhere, but it had the same scrawl, the same slanted bars on the T's and ornamental curlicues on all the O's--especially the signature. The Ss all dipped below the line of writing in both documents. They had the same tendency to slant upward from left to right.
The new letter began with My dear Champion, and she knew.
Fenris was reading over her shoulder, and as she folded into her chair bonelessly, her heart pounding so loudly that she felt it thump all the way through her skull from the roaring in her ears, he gripped her shoulder painfully tight. "Hawke, is that--"
"He wrote them both," she said, her voice cracking. "The fucking First Enchanter helped that motherless nug-fucking bastard kill my mother."
He said nothing more--but he held her when she started to cry, sliding to the floor beside her and lifting her down into his lap, and when she could breathe without sobbing again, she understood his silence.
The First Enchanter was not going to survive this betrayal. If she had to pull the Gallows down stone by stone with her bare hands, she would make him reap the consequences.
Rating: NC-17
Contains: Canon-typical violence, explicit sex
Fic Wordcount: 117,000
Chapter Wordcount:
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.
Hawke let the door click quietly closed behind her and took a deep breath of the morning air--damp with mist and the scent of the sea. Kirkwall was awake and moving, but in Hightown the bustle was muted.
She hadn't even reached the end of her block when she realized there was someone following her. He was trying to be sneaky about it, but he'd been leaning against her neighbor's fence, and there weren't enough people on this street for him to hide. Instead of turning left to Fenris's mansion, she paused and beckoned to the boys who clustered at the corner, ready to deliver messages, packages, or letters. The one who hurried over was a Ferelden lad named Rohan, who had run errands for her before. She slipped him three silver coins. "Tell Fenris to meet me at the Chantry," she said, close to his ear so her voice wouldn't carry.
He nodded and took off at a run. Hawke continued on her way, unhurried, her shoulders drawing tighter as she moved and the stranger followed her. He didn't look Antivan, but not all Crows did. If she had to guess, she'd put her coin on Free Marcher. Still, she kept to the wider streets, where she had space to maneuver and guardsmen would be on duty. The stranger kept his distance, close enough to keep her in sight and far enough that it would look strange if she confronted him.
Fenris joined her a few streets away from the Chantry. "You have company," he said under cover of a loud dispute between footmen wearing different sets of livery.
"I know. It's why I didn't actually go to your house." Some of the tension left her knowing that she wouldn't fight alone if it came to that--and was replaced by worry for him. "What part of 'at the Chantry--'"
"I was on my way there," he said. "But there are only so many ways to get there from where I started, and I noticed him following you."
"I can defend myself on occasion."
"Hawke." She could almost hear his teeth grinding.
"I'm sorry."
His glance spoke volumes of his disbelief, but he let it go. They walked in companionable silence.
Sebastian was on duty at the Chanter's Board, and his face lit with a warm smile when he saw them approach. "Greetings, Hawke, Fenris."
"Any chance you can trade off duties?" Hawke asked lightly. "We've got a meeting."
"Ah, I was just finishing here," Sebastian said. He tacked two more sheets of foolscap to the board and tucked away the hammer and nails in a little wooden box on the side. "You heard back, then?"
"He would like to meet us at our earliest convenience." She swiveled and started off. There was a cart selling fresh pastries at the edge of the square, and she stopped to buy some for all of them.
"Hawke, I don't like to alarm you," Sebastian began.
"The man in black? Yes, I know." Hawke handed him the apple-filled pastry. Fenris got his preferred lemon cream, and she kept the cranberry and orange for herself. "He was waiting outside my house this morning." She bit into her pastry and sighed happily, stepping aside to let others approach the cart. Their follower was forced to dawdle at a cart offering incense and candles to the faithful visiting the Chantry, or else stand out even more loitering in the middle of the street. "He hasn't tried to stab me yet," she added, and took another bite.
Sebastian gave her a reproachful look.
"Well, I can't start a fight with a stranger for no reason in the middle of Hightown," she said when he was safely occupied with a mouthful of pastry.
"Yes, you've certainly never done that before," Fenris said.
"I absolutely had a reason each of those times," she said. "Usually involving a weapon pointed at me." She did not mention that very often he and his sword had been striking before she could even shape a spell.
"I didn't say to start a fight," Sebastian pointed out, having finished with his bite of food.
"That's good, because Aveline would disapprove." Hawke finished her breakfast, and leaned against the wall behind her, watching people approach and leave the Chantry. Several of the ones who passed them greeted Sebastian by name. He seemed to know them all, and she wondered if he would try to bring the same personal and personable knowledge to ruling Starkhaven.
By the time Fenris and Sebastian had finished their food, their shadow had been corralled into forking over coin for incense he probably didn't need, which amused her immensely. Served him right, and the woman who ran the incense cart was lovely and had four children at home to feed.
They resumed their walk, and soon enough arrived at the mansion once more. The butler led them to the same sitting room. De Telvignon was already seated in the larger chair, presumably in an effort to keep Hawke from claiming the seat again. He looked rather pale and unwell. Hawke looked around the room for threats, not bothering to be subtle about it. Fenris remained by the door, which he propped open with the iron weight kept nearby for such purposes. The butler, lingering outside, strolled out of view. Hawke would have bet ten sovereigns he went exactly far enough to not be seen and continued to listen avidly.
"Serah Hawke," their host said faintly. "Welcome."
Hawke did not take the seat he offered. She pulled the reliquary from her knapsack and held it in her hands so that the morning light glinted off it. Sebastian stood with his back to the window, watching both of them, and with a clear view of the door in case anyone tried to sneak up on Fenris, who was doing him the same favor. They were all very well-observed. "I have questions for you," Hawke said after letting the silence linger long enough for a fresh bead of sweat to appear on de Telvignon's forehead. "If your answers are acceptable, you get this and we all leave here contented."
He swallowed hard. "Questions, Serah?"
She thought she'd liked it better when he called her Champion, which fact she did not like at all. "Questions," she agreed. "Let's start with when you knew your daughter had run away, rather than being kidnapped."
"What?" His attempt to feign surprise was worse than Merrill's attempts to bluff at Wicked Grace.
"That's one answer I dislike," Hawke said. "There is an upper limit to my patience. I don't suggest breaching it." She smiled thinly. "Question number two. Who paid you to tell the Crows where we would be?" When he worked his mouth rather than speaking, she sighed. "I've never seen an Orlesian so quiet."
"H-how did you know?" he stammered.
"It beggars belief that even Antivan Crows would find me in a place the size of the Planasene without having some idea of where to look--particularly since they would normally expect to find me in Kirkwall," she explained patiently. "Therefore, someone told them. Since only four people knew where I was going and two of them were with me, that leaves you."
He had all but crumbled in on himself. "Cathleen Ovlin," he mumbled. "She's a Starkhaven noblewoman. I--I had some debts in Orlais and she bought them up. It wasn't about you. She said you'd have someone with you and she wanted him dead."
Hawke raised an eyebrow. "There were two Crows with two separate contracts," she prompted.
"I swear on Andraste's ashes that I only knew about one," he protested. "Please, Champion, have mercy."
He was back to calling her Champion, which was interesting. Hawke tilted the reliquary and watched the reflected light dance on the ceiling. "Lady Clarice does not choose to return to your dubious protection," she said. "She sends this with her compliments."
His eyes fixed on it. Hawke tapped the side of the box with her fingernails and he looked up at her--she wasn't tall, but with him sitting, she was tall enough. "You can have it back if you write a note to Lady Merinfort--to be delivered by me--asserting that her favor to you is repaid." Hawke let her smile widen. "Of course, there are alternatives, but I don't think you'll enjoy them." She thought, distantly, that she did not much care for the ease with which she'd used her position--and reputation--to threaten him, but she cared less for the fact that he'd helped someone try to assassinate Sebastian.
She'd heard of the Great Game in Orlais, and she was forced to conclude that one reason this man was in Kirkwall was that he was abysmally bad at it. He did, however, appear to recognize when the only option left to him was to fold. He rose from his seat and went to the escritoire, where he hurriedly drafted a note. He approached her, after a fashion, holding the letter out at the full reach of his arm. She couldn't quite reach it from where she stood, but she could read it if she squinted.
Dear Lady Merinfort,
Let this serve as notice that Serah Hawke has completed my request and accordingly, your favor to me is repaid.
Edouard de Telvignon
"Seal it," she said, and he hurried to do so. He set it down carefully on the table near the door; Fenris picked it up. Hawke started to set the reliquary down on the chair he'd meant for her, but it was dusty in a way that gave her pause--in distinct contrast to the rest of the room. Instead, she walked over to the chair he'd used and set it there.
"I hope I never see you again," she told him honestly, and then she and her companions left him standing there, panting.
The butler, as she had anticipated, was lurking a few steps aside from the door. She looked toward him. "Wear a damp cloth over your nose and mouth when he asks you to move that chair," she advised. "It'll keep you from breathing in too much."
The butler's mouth dropped open, and then he nodded, his expression tightening. As they saw themselves out, de Telvignon shouted for the butler to come remove the chair, and it was the kind of occasion where Hawke would have preferred not to be right.
"What was that about?" Fenris asked, when they were outside and the door had shut behind them.
"The chair was awfully dusty for being in a room that clean," Hawke said. "I don't know poisons well, but given the Crows, I made an assumption."
Sebastian hissed in a breath. "And you warned the butler because he wouldn't."
"I hope the butler finds another job soon," Hawke said, in lieu of acknowledgment.
Fenris frowned. "Even a magister wouldn't be so careless with a slave in that position," he said. "Why would he do it to a servant who can leave?"
"'Terrible people with power' is not a class of person exclusively made up of mages," Hawke answered.
His frown deepened, but he didn't say anything more.
The man who'd followed them earlier was still lingering outside the mansion. Hawke pushed down the temptation to go start a confrontation right now--the thrumming awareness and energy of having just dodged one kind of threat and solved one kind of problem was pushing her to make bad decisions, but she would not let it master her. Instead, she left Sebastian at the Chantry, detoured past Lady Merinfort's home to drop off the letter that would free her from that particular agreement, and then Fenris accompanied her back home. He went to the library to practice his reading, and Hawke steeled herself to tackle the pile of letters she'd abandoned the day before.
The first one she picked up was from the First Enchanter. Just the thought of having to embroil herself further in the ongoing war between him and Meredith made her tired. As she unfolded it, one of the candle sconces above her desk flickered out in the draft as Orana came in from the kitchen with a tray of tea. The flickering candlelight of the remaining candle half illuminated the letter--and Hawke saw something hideously, gut-wrenchingly familiar in the slanted scrawl and the over-decorated O of the First Enchanter's signature. She stumbled out of her chair and bolted into the library, narrowly avoiding a very startled Orana.
"Hawke? What is it?" Fenris set his book aside as she dashed to the far corner of the library.
She'd left those documents on a shelf too high for her to reach. Stupidly, she jumped and grabbed at the shelf, to no avail. Fenris appeared almost silently at her side with the stepstool that she used for those higher shelves. She muttered a distracted thanks as she climbed it and dragged down the plain wooden box.
She could tell Fenris was worried by how he hovered instead of standing back, but she couldn't think about that now. She wrenched the top off and scattered the letters of sympathy--many perfunctory or sycophantic, and several very genuine ones from her mother's friends--until she came to the leather folder at the bottom. Inside were the documents she'd shoved willy-nilly into her bag during the assault on the foundry where Quentin kept his workshop. She'd made some attempt to smooth them out without reading them again after. She wasn't even really sure why she'd kept them. Something had nagged at her about it, but she hadn't been able to think about it then, and told herself she'd handle it later--before promptly shoving it in a closed box she kept on a shelf she couldn't see in a part of the library she didn't use, in an excellent example of her capacity to deceive herself.
She found the note she wanted, written on rough foolscap rather than the fine parchment of the new letter from the First Enchanter. Leaving everything else scattered on the floor, she hurried back to her desk and laid the note next to the letter.
Nausea rose in her throat as her eyes consumed the note once again.
My dear friend,
I have obtained the books you requested. I'll leave them at our usual hiding spot. Please collect them as soon as possible. I would hate to see them in the wrong hands!
Your last letter was fascinating! You have proven me wrong, once again, by doing the impossible. I shouldn't have doubted your resolve, and I hope you will keep me apprised of further progress.
Your friend and colleague,
O
The new letter was less hurriedly written, clearly a fair copy of something drafted elsewhere, but it had the same scrawl, the same slanted bars on the T's and ornamental curlicues on all the O's--especially the signature. The Ss all dipped below the line of writing in both documents. They had the same tendency to slant upward from left to right.
The new letter began with My dear Champion, and she knew.
Fenris was reading over her shoulder, and as she folded into her chair bonelessly, her heart pounding so loudly that she felt it thump all the way through her skull from the roaring in her ears, he gripped her shoulder painfully tight. "Hawke, is that--"
"He wrote them both," she said, her voice cracking. "The fucking First Enchanter helped that motherless nug-fucking bastard kill my mother."
He said nothing more--but he held her when she started to cry, sliding to the floor beside her and lifting her down into his lap, and when she could breathe without sobbing again, she understood his silence.
The First Enchanter was not going to survive this betrayal. If she had to pull the Gallows down stone by stone with her bare hands, she would make him reap the consequences.