Kûlîlk
Adaar wakes in chains to a human speaking at her.
“Kata tal-eb iss mer-toh ari-van katoh, athlock karassran anaan esaam.”
Not to her, at her; the words a switch to the front of her skull, as prickled as they are meaningless. She’s awake yes, but dizzy, and the woman in the chair in front of her slip-slides across her vision like hot butter across a pan.
“Karassran,” the human demands again. Barks it, an order, like the fact that she’s even being made to wait is unacceptable. “Maraas nehraa aqun ebra kata imekari.”
Confusion begets anger. On dormant vocal cords, Adaar coughs up, “I don’t speak qunlat.”
She might just cough something else up as well. A wave of nausea rolls over her, brought on by the pain wracking her body. It’s a bone-deep ache, the kind that lingers after shaking off a fever, but now that her senses are coming to her, she can determine the actual source: not illness but a horrid jabbing at the end of her arm. It’s chained tightly behind her, out of view, and her first thought is shit, have they cut it off? Unbidden, an old instance of human superstition crops up, of ‘they can’t do magic without their hands’, and the resulting adrenaline spike doesn’t exactly help in the fight to get her bearings. Nor does the ring of soldiers she’s just now noticing, all standing around her with swords at her throat.
The human with the sarbraak’s jib does not react. She’s leaned forward in her chair, legs spread, an elbow on each knee. A face that lends itself to the severe expression it wears, with a thick brow and rows tight at the scalp—a face that wouldn’t look out of place on a Qunari, funnily enough.
After a moment, she says, “She’s not Ben-Hassrath.”
Dazed, Adaar thinks, of course I’m not? She assumed the statement was said to her, as the human hadn’t changed her tone nor moved her eyes when she’d spoken, but another figure materializes to become the recipient.
“You can’t assume that, Inquisitor,” the hood next to her says. Thinner frame. Another human. “A thoroughly trained agent wouldn’t react either, even under duress.”
The seated woman hasn’t responded to Adaar, but she doesn’t respond to the other human either, which Adaar takes mild vindication in. If this madwoman is giving Adaar nothing, might as well spread it around. The stare bearing down at her makes her want to fall back into whatever pit of unconsciousness she just crawled out of. Meeting it requires an incredible concentration of willpower. It’s not quite like any a human has leveled at her before, not even the prickliest kinds of humans holding back their disdain long enough to make sure she gets a job done. This feels empty of intent, flayed of anything resembling emotion, allowing it to drive a spike right through her sockets and into her psyche.
Despite the lingering fever, she is cold.
“She’s not,” the human repeats.
She—the hood called her Inquisitor—folds her hands. And Adaar feels rightly Inquired about, so it’s all very fitting. If she could be more terrified with all the sword-pointing and the apparent on-trial-being she would be, but it seems her body is so dehydrated she doesn’t even have to worry about wetting herself out of terror.
“That is it?” Another human woman—blood and spite, she’s up to her horns in human women, how many more are going to shake out of the gasolier?—speaks. “What of the Divine? The Conclave? Thousands dead and you claim she is innocent?”
“I didn’t say that Seeker. I said she wasn’t Ben-Hassrath. Of her involvement, we’ve yet to determine.”
Do they just assume every random Qunari causing trouble is Ben-Hassrath? Adaar thinks. What am I saying, of course they do.
She’s smart enough not to voice that thought. What she isn’t smart enough not to do is ask, “What, exactly, have I supposedly become involved in? I do try not to get involved in things. As a point of personal pride.”
“You-!” Seeker steps toward her.
Inquisitor holds up a hand, back of it flat against Seeker’s chest, keeping her in place as surely as if it were an iron door bar. The motion draws attention to the emblem on her chest, an eye that surveils Adaar back as soon as she notices it. Vague familiarity sobers her, and she swallows, regretting becoming mouthy in front of the new organization that has the whole Conclave under its command. The Inquisition, wasn’t it? That would make sense with its leader’s title, for that’s the only person this woman can be.
Something else stokes Adaar’s memory; Seeker to the chair’s right, the indeterminate hooded woman to the left. Not enough for answers though. Just enough to know she’s sinking herself into some deep shit.
It’s not fair. Taarlok is the one who usually handles the humans, or Shokrakar when absolutely necessary. Adaar is expected to throw a fireball or slap some poultices on a sprained ankle. She doesn’t know what words offend them, how to keep their capricious natures from changing their minds about letting Qunari walk about unaccosted.
“I don’t get involved,” she says again, and it comes out pleading, pride fading fast while on her knees and surrounded by intent. “I don’t cause problems. I just…I just stand in the back. You have to believe me.”
She thinks someone will scoff. One of the three of them, at the very least. No one does.
“What you stand accused of,” Inquisitor goes on, “is the murder of the Divine and the destruction of the Temple of Sacred Ashes. How the Temple was destroyed is yet unknown, so determining if you are capable of such a thing is likewise unknown.”
“I couldn’t. I wouldn’t, I’m no one.”
“You’re a member of the Valo-Kas mercenary band, is that not correct?” the hood says. “Companies do not often disclose their rosters openly, but when the dust settles and we are able to locate the remaining members, I am sure they will be…perfectly forthcoming about whether they’ve been keeping an apostate in their midst.”
“No!” she stutters, the implication of what these people might do to her company tugging the word out of her. “I’m-I’m a mage. I’ll tell you. Y-you don’t need to-”
There’s a ripple in the jury, a glance at one another that makes Adaar realize they already knew that. In the same way they already knew her company name and pretended they didn’t; the most basic interrogation technique, and Adaar stumbled over it like a root in the woods. What are they fishing for?
After a brief conversation consisting only of imploring looks and raised brows, Inquisitor speaks.
“That is not,” she does not break eye contact from the hood, “what Sister Nightingale meant. Though I thank you for your forthrightness. If you truly are committed to being helpful, then there is something I would ask of you.”
Nightingale. At least that sounds like someone’s name and not the barrage of titles that have been indiscreetly telling her how screwed Adaar is.
“Inquisitor,” Nightingale warns.
“Go on ahead,” Inquisitor tells her. “I will take responsibility for her, and we’ll see what can be done.”
Adaar flinches. An Inquisition conjures images of an iron maiden, a rack stretching her sockets while the hood asks her questions. They’d said the Divine was dead. These are the people in charge now. No one’s coming to save her.
Seeker approaches, and she braces.
A fist or a blade doesn’t come. Instead, Seeker’s voice moves behind her and says, “I trust you know what you’re doing, Inquisitor,” as she cuts the cord binding Adaar’s wrists.
When she next opens her eyes, the soldiers-on-command have taken a step back.
“Of course you do,” Inquisitor says. “If you didn’t, you wouldn’t have saddled me with this position.”
It’s the first time she’s heard anything close to irreverence in a long while, which almost makes her queasy as she stands and rubs her wrists. Her hand’s not gone. That’s surprising. It certainly feels severed, even as her eyes accept the fact that it’s there and hidden in a large glove. Another bolt shoots up her ulna; they’ve gone and cursed her is what happened. These humans are insane.
They’re still quibbling with each other while she’s trying to gain her bearings.
“Having second thoughts? You were not so reluctant when I first offered.”
“Make no mistake; I do not regret it. But giant holes in the sky sure have a way of testing that.”
Adaar examines the curse closer. There is a green fire trying to ooze its way from her palm and through the druffalo hide, and seeing the source somehow makes the pain bearable, easier to understand. Something to be studied.
Her nose is practically against it when Inquisitor’s hand closes over her own. “Come. The Seeker will explain on the way.”
The mention of a hole in the sky is so beyond Adaar’s capability to deal with right now that it’d simply gone in one ear and out the other. Now, as the three of them trek through the wildly billowing Frostbacks while the Inquisition lays out in great detail what exactly they want from her, she can’t take her eyes off it. It burns. Though the radiation never melts the snow clinging to the rocks, she faces it like she would face the sun, unthinkingly closing her eyes and feeling it beat against her cheeks every moment she stops to breathe.
“You think I can fix that?” she asks.
“Sometimes we have little option but hope,” Seeker says.
There are others waiting for them at the top of the climb, shedding blood under another small green sun, a daughterling of the belching deity at the peak. This one she detects in the mark, the little boil growing just under her skin. Magic, like the portal but not quite, shoots in a jet past her ear.
“My apologies,” its wielder says. “It appears those reinforcements have come after all!”
The latter statement is shouted to a dwarf, who replies, “No one believes me when I say Hawke always shows!” as he fires a massive crossbow bolt into an oncoming demon.
“Please stop making me sound infallible,” Inquisitor says, dropping her shield in between him and another wraith. “I can't always be here Varric. And thinking I am is going to get horror-teeth in your spine.”
“And no one believes me when I say she always brings the mood down when she does!” the dwarf continues, unbothered.
Adaar had been wondering if Hawke is another take on Nightingale, but the catch-up who’s who is being processed too slowly in the thick of battle. While the pair trade jibes, another(!) human woman lands within inches of Adaar’s outstretched hands, dispatching the wraith she’d been warding off with a jet of flame. The daggers glint like ice, and the smile she flashes over is just sharp.
“Careful there, Poppet,” she says. “Don’t let them distract you. Their banter’s not nearly as funny as they’d like you to believe.”
“Oh Isabela, you love our banter,” Varric shouts back.
“Not for the ears of our dear, sweet inpatient. She’s trying to concentrate can’t you see? Behind!”
Adaar spins and cracks the scavenged staff across the shade’s skull. If demons even have skulls. Either way the sound is earsplitting, and Isabela laughs, rushing forward to finish it off with her twin blades. Adaar wonders how they can joke, any of them, when the rush keeps coming despite how many they’ve killed. Her hand is sucking up all the heat, and these people are going to kill her and…
And…
“Here.”
The mage is next to her. She’d forgotten how small elves were, especially now that he is holding her hand in his, and the slender fingers make it all the more obvious. The glove—it’s not hers, they must have put it on her while she was unconscious, an attempt to keep the curse from spreading into the air—is too large anyway. Yes, here, they even had to tie it with a leather cord to make it stay on. All this goes through her mind as the mage lifts her glove and holds it to the rift.
It drags her. Like a line from the ancient spring days when Tama had still been trying to teach her to fish, jerking her arm so forcefully it takes both her and her guide to keep her feet from sliding across the dirt. The daughterling winges, groaning.
Then all at once the tension collapses, imploding with the sound of vanished lightning.
“…It worked,” she says.
Up until this moment she’d thought it a stupid assumption born of desperation, but maybe even these things can fall into place.
“A good thing that,” Isabela says, wiping off her daggers on the nearest snowdrift. “I didn’t fancy fighting those things forever. Or at least until all our toes froze off.”
“I don’t think any of us did,” Seeker agrees.
“The help I was speaking of,” Inquisitor says, gesturing to the small band of newcomers that had been guarding the portal. “Captain Isabela of the Waking Sea Raiders-”
Isabela bows with a flourish.
“-Varric Tethras-”
“What no title?” Varric, says. “No Varric Tethras, his esteemed Lordship, Val Royeaux Times #1 Best Seller?”
“…Varric Tethras, Head of House Tethras, of the Dwarven Merchant’s Guild.”
“Ouch. Didn’t have to go there, Hawke.”
“You have already met Lady Cassandra Pentaghast,” Inquisitor motions to Seeker. To the mage, she says, “…And, forgive me Solas, but with such a short acquaintance, it seems I cannot offer a proper introduction.”
“I don’t think any level of familiarity would manifest a lordship for me,” Solas says, and it’s hard to tell if he’s sarcastic or not. He inclines his head to Adaar. “Solas will do.”
There’s a grimness to his smile that she recognizes on sight; the need to be polite, even when surrounded by enemies. To be liked, nonthreatening, since being bitter would give them just the justification they need. It is this, or the way that his magic sung something comforting in the mark, but she decides she is more akin with him than with any in this Inquisition.
“And you are?” Adaar asks Inquisitor, the one who’s introduced everyone but herself.
“Leader of the Inquisition.”
“Though you can just call her Hawke,” Varric says. “Everyone else does.”
“Or terrible bore, Champion Mange Breath, gold-for-tits, Messere Wet Blanket, take your pick,” Isabela drawls idly.
At first Adaar is aghast. But the ‘Leader of the Inquisition’ doesn’t respond to the insubordination or even flinch at the outright insult. In fact, she continues looking ahead, as though not to encourage her. They’re all moving on like nothing’s out of the ordinary, staring straight at Adaar.
Ah, right, Adaar remembers. I’m not out of this one yet. She says, “Adaar. Just Adaar is fine.”
It’s small, but Solas’s smile to her is more genuine than it was to the Inquisition.
When they start again, just another troupe forcing its way up the mountainside, she finds she’s fallen in step beside him. It’s not her imagination that Cassandra watches the interaction out of the corner of her eye. Is that really the sort of thing Templars spend their time worrying about? One mage is a problem, two is a conspiracy?
Keeping a corner-eye of her own on the Seeker, Adaar says to Solas, “Varric says you were the one keeping me alive?”
“I did my best. Though ultimately, it was you who made it through the worst of what the mark had to offer. You’re a remarkably strong-willed woman, Adaar.”
“Me?”
“You,” he chuckles slightly.
Alright then. So it’s not just the humans that are insane.
“Is this your glove, then?”
“Yes. Feel free to hold on to it. I’ve lost the right one anyways.”
They’re halted at the bridge by a human man in a stupid hat who rants about nothing while the hood slips discreetly back into their party. She’s whispering something into Hawke’s ear. Isabela is whispering something into Varric’s ear, which makes him snort. All in all, a whole lot of whispering, a whole lot of accusations that make Adaar realize there is much, much more going on than a tear in the sky.
“Your attempts to…provide order are commendable but unnecessary, Viscount,” the man says stiffly. “Our role is to serve the Divine. Until the Grand Clerics elect a new one, we should retreat, at which point we follow her direction.”
“Viscount?” Adaar asks. So much of this is going over her head.
“Pah,” he says. “The ruler of a Marcher city-state involving herself on the Fereldan-Orlesian border.”
“I am involving myself in a Chantry affair, a position I was rightly appointed to before Her Grace’s demise,” Hawke says.
“And yet you have her murderer following you around like a lap dog!”
“Enough of this. We’re proceeding toward the Breach. Sister Nightingale, if his followers attempt to stop us, have him arrested.”
He sputters as they walk past, but even this apparent victory puts a watermelon’s seed in Adaar’s gut. Normally, she wouldn’t know a damn thing about politics, but that little corner of Thedas has made itself infamous of late, where even some no-one mercenary has heard of its troubles. Not the same Viscount who put down the first mage rebellion in Kirkwall, surely? The Divine couldn’t have called on her and expected the mages to come for peace talks, could she?
“Is she,” Adaar motions discreetly at the warrior’s back, “really the one? That everyone’s talking about?”
“Really the Viscount of Kirkwall?” Solas says. “Yes, and those two,” he indicates Varric and Isabela, the former intently discussing the veins of red lyrium on the crater's walls with Hawke, and the latter trying to distract them, “aren’t the only people she brought with her to the Inquisition. A great many templars now number among the soldier’s watching us. Even the Commander you met was her installation.”
“Shit. And you picked here to hide from the end of the world?”
“We’re not hiding from it here; we’re stopping it here.”
It doesn’t reassure her, even when the visions from the Breach begin and the hostility from the Seeker melts away. The doubt that all of this could fall so neatly into place rears its head again. When she reaches up into the mother-of-all-rifts and holds the fishing line again, she’s sure the blackness that consumes her is going to be for good this time.
“Herald. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
Adaar stands in Hawke’s office. The Inquisitor’s office. A repurposed room of Haven’s chantry that Adaar had to practically strong-arm Cassandra away from to get inside. She’s still bleary-eyed from her second fade-induced knockout within as many days—this time, unlike when they had her trussed up for questioning and given her some simple peasant wear, she’s pretty sure these are just undergarments she’s been walking around the crisp air in. It doesn’t matter. She’s talking to this snake now.
“What is… What is all of that?” Adaar gestures outward. To the chantry yard. To the whispering volumes.
“The faithful,” Hawke says.
She has a pair of round spectacles that flash in the torchlight as she glances up. The white sheen is gone when she looks down again. She dips her quill.
“Why are they calling me The Herald of Andraste?” Adaar grits.
“Because that is what you are.”
“Who says? You?” Adaar stops. “You. You took that rumor about the woman behind me in the fade and you…spread it.”
“It was politically convenient. Chancellor Roderick wasn’t the only one in Val Royeaux unhappy with me upjumping past them all into Justinia’s pocket. Or, more accurately, into the brand new stocking that is the Inquisition, which they’d rather not exist in the first place. You,” she lifts her eyes again, “grant us legitimacy.”
“I’ll not grant you anything. I’m taking my legitimacy and I’m leaving.”
Bold words, but she’s impassioned; she can feel them, or maybe that’s the words of the quartermaster that’s left her still stinging. Still, she found the backbone she didn’t have before when she woke chained and confused. They can’t hold her now. They can’t.
“Quite the turnaround,” Hawke says. “When yesterday you were so daunted by us you’d barely answer a question.”
“You don’t actually have any authority.”
“No?”
“No. You made a mistake. You lifted me up, made me some…Andrastian figurehead, but now you can’t touch me. Not without inciting all those people out there.” She blusters through it, the speech improvised the moment it leaves her lips.
“True.” Hawke scratches something on the parchment.
“So. There.”
“That legitimacy goes both ways,” Hawke says. “You could leave, yes; but then you would quite physically be abandoning the faithful. How long until these people—who are so desperate for answers, for truth in material form that they turned to a Qunari as their savior—grow jaded? Their adoration grows sour, they hunt you down and demand why you have forsaken them. You can go now, mercenary, but if you run you will be running for the rest of your life.”
Adaar swallows. There could be nothing worse. She can imagine it all too easily: more of those outside, the ones that had struggled just for a touch of her sleeve as she passed. She pictures them hounding her, tearing away the barest anonymity she would find within a medium sized company of other Qunari.
Her mouth works, silently, tripped in the noose right up until a voice says, “Oh Hawke, you’re scaring her.”
She jumps only a little. Isabela, slouched wrongways in a thinly-draped wooden chair, went unnoticed when she’d first stormed in, folded as she is into the corner with one boot dangling over the chair’s arm. The captain is holding a dagger with a finger on each end, wobbling it in a state between mild amusement and staved boredom.
Hawke sighs.
“Leliana told me to phrase it more diplomatically,” she says. “That if you were to leave, we could no longer guarantee your protection.”
“Still a threat, from the other way around,” Adaar accomplishes, managing to save a bit of face.
“Agreed. That’s why I told it to you as is. You deserve to know what you’re getting into, even if you don’t have a choice.”
“Hawke. Work on your recruitment speech.” Isabela rolls her eyes. “How you managed to get us all in bed with you, I’ll never understand.”
“Interesting turn of phrase.” Hawke does not look up.
This, apparently, does not suit Isabela, who gets up and practically languishes herself across Hawke’s desk. “Sweet Thing. Dear Inquisitor. Leader of the world’s most controversial shiny little boys club. Say something to comfort your most essential asset.”
“I don’t think I can be comforted,” Adaar admits. “This…really is just all politics for you?”
“Assume what you like.” Hawke is looking at where Isabela is sitting partially on her papers, keeping any annoyance inward. A bit of un-dried ink has gotten on Isabela’s thigh.
“All this talk of legitimacy just doesn’t sound very…Andrastian,” Adaar admits. “Cassandra, at the very least, seemed to believe I was chosen somehow.”
“I would never doubt the conviction of our Seeker. Yet, at the same time, she needs to believe,” Hawke says. “I take it you do not?”
“Do you know many Andrastian Qunari?”
“I’ve known dwarves and elves who believe. But my experience with Qunari outside the Qun is limited.”
“Which is a good thing you’re outside,” Isabela says. “If there’s one thing Hawke hates it’s Qunari.”
Adaar is shocked still for a moment before Isabela bursts out laughing.
“It’s a joke, Poppet.” She pats Adaar’s cheek on the way to the door. “But I can tell this conversation is about to get unsexily theological, so I’ll leave you to it. She’s not so terrifying, don’t worry. Just take her with a firm hand.”
The fingers linger for just a fraction too long, trail just slightly too far past Adaar’s jaw. The letters es are written backwards on Isabela’s leg.
“I know we all like to watch Isabela leave,” Hawke says after a moment, “but is there something you wanted to discuss, Herald?
Adaar jolts back to the present. The two hold each other’s gaze for a moment.
“So,” Adaar says. “Looks like we’ll be working together.”
“It appears that way, yes.”
“What’s next then?”
Hawke removes her spectacles and massages wrinkles into her forehead.
“Something has gone awry with the Templar Order.”
“You don’t say.”
“I mean before all this,” Hawke waves her hand. “When I was Viscount of Kirkwall, it was only because the Order there asked me to intervene. The chaos after the Chantry’s destruction…Well. It looked a lot like this. No evidence to suggest they’re connected, and our Ambassador tells me I’m paranoid, but I can’t help shake the feeling that someone wants the players of the world shaken and at each other’s throats.”
“You spend a lot of time steppingin when everyone is confused and scared,” Adaar accuses. “One might say you’re the one benefiting most from this chaos.”
“That is the opposite point I’m trying to make,” Hawke says. “The Order asked.”
“Just like Cassandra asked.”
Hawke glares and continues, “Meaning that they should’ve been content after practically begging me to assume the position. Yet, sometime after the vote at the White Spire, a contingent of templars attacked me. At first we believed them to be displeased radicals.”
“Displeased?”
“Some would have rather I dealt with the mages more heavy handedly.”
Adaar scoffs. “Executing nearly every mage in Kirkwall wasn’t enough?”
“It’s the nearly they were caught on. When it came down to the very last stand, many mages surrendered rather than fight back. An annulment is an ugly thing. It demands every mage be killed on suspicion alone; in the heat of battle I told my templars to spare those surrendering. Meredith disagreed.”
“Oh how merciful of you. Dispensing forgiveness while at the same time killing every other mage who dared to fight back.”
“Judge me if you like,” Hawke shrugs. “But despite the ongoing civil war, the Kirkwall Circle still stands. Many loyalist mages have congregated there.”
“No wonder you were the Divine’s new favorite.”
It’s unorthodox to have this conversation. To talk about the late Divine so casually, when even mentioning the Chantry should spell doom. It is surreal to be able to stand here, in the flesh, decrying one of the greatest extinguishers of mage lives and have her merely accept the charges with a shrug and say it couldn’t have gone much better.
“This is no longer about Kirkwall though, not just,” Hawke says. “After the attack was repelled, further examination of the supposed dissenters proved them…strange. Their bodies were growing crystals. Inside their organs.”
“Like…lyrium crystals?”
“Yes, but red.” Hawke turns a piece of parchment toward Adaar. “We thought it was impossible. The only known source of red lyrium was under heavy guard in the Gallows, consumed upon the Knight-Commander’s expiration.”
“…Impossible, right up until there was red lyrium growing out of the crater at the temple.”
The parchment is a rather gruesome sketch of a dissected human. There are notes in Hawke’s hand and others.
“Yes. I believe someone has turned a sect of the order, perhaps an opportunistic Knight-Captain, or even as high as another Knight-Commander, following Meredith’s example. For anyone influential enough, it would be easy to begin serving contaminated lyrium, then take control of however many soldiers he or she needed. My investigation is why I accepted this job in the first place. The goal of an Inquisition,” Hawke dips her quill, “is to find answers.”
A smarter woman would hold her suspicions closer to her chest, but Adaar is still burning from the faithful who tried to grab at her while she was still running through Haven in an undershirt. She petulantly adds, “Convenient that you survived to carry on your investigation, then. Why weren’t you up at the Temple?”
“Sister Nightingale had a report for me. It turned out to be nothing. Though I expect nothing I tell you will convince you one way or the other, since you’ve made up your mind not to believe me.”
Frustratingly logical. Adaar has a different question then. “All this because you, what? Feel responsibility to the Order?”
“If the Order falls, Thedas will be worse for it. Even mages are better off when they can be looked after by a reasonable third party.”
You don’t really believe that do you? skitters across Adaar’s mind at the same time she realizes it isn’t worth asking. It’s clear as anything: Hawke does believe it. She may not have the chant on her lips, but she believes in this.
“I’ll send for you when I have more details,” Hawke says, a dismissal if Adaar’s ever heard one.
Personally, she’s just fine getting out of the stuffy study. There’s so much to sort through, and she can’t do it with the Inquisitor’s stone apathy weighing in the room.
“For what it's worth, I am sorry,” a call follows her out.
“As if you wouldn’t do it again in a heartbeat.”
“Yes,” Hawke says. “Maker go with you, Herald.”
The door clicks shut.
She half expects Isabela to be waiting outside, claims that politics bore her or no. But instead the one leaning against the opposite office—the Ambassador’s, who Adaar has heard mention of but still hasn’t met—is the dwarf, Tethras. It doesn’t look like he was listening in, but he does react to her arrival with suspicious punctuality.
“Killer done shaking you like a chew toy?” he asks. “C’mon. If you’re like me, you need a stiff drink after talking to Hawke.”
Adaar hesitates. He’s one of Hawke’s is he not? Who she brought with her from Kirkwall? Yet if Isabela is any indication, maybe that doesn’t mean everything.
“A drink would be nice,” she says eventually.
“Great. How good’s a mercenary’s pay these days? Kidding!” he says when Adaar frowns down at him.
Getting drinks is…nice. She’d barely seen Haven between being dragged through in chains and storming to the chantry as fast as possible. Varric likes to talk about things that aren’t the world ending, and for the time being, she’s grateful. She doesn’t mind pretending for a moment that there’s nothing in the world to worry about except scummy editors and whether his favorite bar in Kirkwall is still going to be standing when he gets back.
“Is it…alright?” Adaar has to ask. “For the Viscount to just…abdicate and sail across the entire Waking Sea?”
“She’s left the city in good hands,” Varric says. “Aveline can hold down the fort, and Brann will deal with whatever she doesn’t have any patience for.”
Adaar purses her lips.
“Don’t tell me you haven’t read my book!” Varric says. “Well, do when you get the chance, it’ll make all this name dropping a lot easier. But if you were asking if she can run a Chantry organization and still be the Viscount of Kirkwall, then yeah, sure seems like she can.” He shakes his head. “Hawke can do anything apparently. And it’s damn annoying.”
“I’ll say. Why do you all follow her anyway? The Seeker’s starstruck, but the rest of you must see she’s…”
A monster, thinks Adaar. But she hasn’t seen proof of that, more just a feeling. She’s not as ruthless as the reports from the Kirkwall rebellion led her to believe, but that’s a very low bar.
“It’s…Look,” Varric says. “Spend enough time around Hawke and she…Andraste, how do I even begin to explain Hawke poisoning? She gets into your head, I guess. Says a lot of bullshit, but the kind of bullshit that keeps eating at you later, wondering if maybe she’s right about you. You’ll see.”
“I don’t look forward to that.”
“Yeah. You shouldn’t. Anyway,” he continues, “the logistical answer of following Hawke around is simpler. Rivaini’s sleeping with her. I have to keep her out of trouble. Curly’s probably the only one of us who actually gives a rat’s ass about keeping the Templars together after all this, so that’s why he’s along for the ride. Run of the mill collection of do-gooders. Almost makes me nostalgic.”
Adaar dribbles a little drink onto her chin. “The Inquisitor and Isabela are together?”
He raises a brow. “You really need to read my book.”
“I thought…they just don’t even really seem to like each other, you know?”
“Oh, they like each other plenty. If you talk to Isabela, she’ll tell you in great detail how much they like each other.”
“I. Hm.”
“Take your time.”
She draws her tankard in with both hands, looking at the circle of her reflection. “Thanks for this, Varric.”
“The drink? It was only six coppers.”
“No, I mean. This whole day…few days I guess now, it’s what I’ve always been afraid of. One Qunari all alone, and suddenly she’s the scariest thing and…I’m not! I’m a mage!”
“Some people find mages pretty damn scary.”
“But not…imposing. You have to understand—in my company, I’m the scrawny one. The dweeb, the creampuff. I’m not deadlifting druffalo as part of my workout routine, I’m not wrestling bears just to show off.”
“Do…Qunari mercs actually do that crap?”
“Vashoth mercs do. So being surrounded by that, it gives you a chance to be something else, you know?”
“You’ve lost me,” Varric says. “Being a loser is therapeutic for you?”
“Being the odd one out among Qunari. Here I’m…” She glances around. It’s been hard to ignore the other patrons glancing at her, the awe that warms even hotter than the fire in the hearth. “What they’ve decided Qunari are, whether I’m that or not. I don’t want to be what they’ve decided for me. And I definitely don’t want to be their Herald.”
“Well, from a not very dwarf-y dwarf, I’ll toast to being a not very qun-y Qunari.” Varric lifts his glass. “As for the Herald stuff, can’t help with that, but if you ever need to get away some time, I’ll be right here. Fair enough, Creampuff?”
She manages a laugh. A feeble one, but one for the toast. “Fair enough.”