Chapter Text
I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in
—excerpt from Variations on the Word Sleep, by Margaret Atwood
“Hie there, girl, to the block!” shouts Bortas, gesturing her forward impatiently with the whip handle. Hawke considers headbutting him into the crowd below, but if she embarrasses him so publicly here they won’t stop at beating her senseless this time. She settles for a mutinous glare, as if it will matter, and takes the three halting steps to the raised block beside him.
Eight inches tall at the most, but her ankles are chained so tightly together it might have been a mile. The writhing impotence is nothing new; neither is the abject shame as the crowd laughs at her humiliation. Bortas knocks her knees from behind with the handle of his whip so they buckle forwards, bashing them so hard against the edge of the block she yelps. The crowd laughs again as she crawls forward onto the stage, as she struggles to her feet at last with hands bound tightly at the wrists, then bound again to the heavy brass chain around her waist. A few whistle. She stares above their heads to the middle distance, pretending she is unmoved.
Bortas chuckles behind her, soft, smug. The arrogance is enraging; without her bindings her wrath would set every inch of this slaves’ stand afire at once. The brass collar around her throat lights white-hot even as it siphons away her magic, as if in sympathy, and Bortas laughs again. “Angry little thing,” he murmurs, smiling, and runs his hand possessively down her side and hip to grip the inside of her thigh through her thin white shift. “Don’t worry, my girl. You’ll be through with me soon enough.”
“Don’t tease!” shouts someone from the bright, cheerful crowd, and Hawke clenches her eyes shut. She’d kick him off if she didn’t fear falling; even after six weeks the tight range of her chains occasionally surprises her, and the only thing worse than being sold at some Tevinter auction in the middle of Cytates would be to break her neck needlessly in the process.
Ah, but would it really be worse? a soft voice asks. She grits her teeth.
“I bet she bites,” someone else calls, clearly enjoying her fury, and Hawke opens her eyes the narrowest slit. A busy crowd for the Tevinter city, the sunny weather warm but not stifling, the colorful silks and tapestries which line this market street dancing in the gentle winds. Enough prospective purchasers have gathered at this auction that annoyed passersby must elbow their way through the far side of the street. The two bustling branches of the market are spaced well apart on either side; no spice stalls would dare be set close to the stage, nor fruits or meats—not with the rank, powerful odor of unwashed flesh overwhelming all nearby. Even the nearest linen-seller seems irritated at every twist of the breeze in her direction. Occasionally the reek of fish floats by, telling Hawke they are closer to the docks than she’d suspected, but nothing else arises to place her in the city, no other clues to pinpoint which street might lead the most directly to her freedom.
Not that she has much chance of getting at it, she thinks bitterly, as Bortas squeezes her thigh once more. She’s barely warded off despair for six weeks; there’s little left of her courage now behind the helpless rage.
“Come on, Bortas! Put her up!”
Bortas throws back his head in laughter, the long black tail of his hair flying. “Peace, friends!” he calls, and smacks her hard on the ass before striding forward to the stage’s edge. She lurches again—manages not to fall through the spike of agony in her back—bites the inside of her cheek so hard she tastes blood. Somehow—somehow, one day she will break this collar and she will kill him—
Eventually the roaring in her ears subsides enough for her to realize he’s more than halfway through her auction plate. Tevene is not her strongest language, but she can pick out most of it: female, thirty or so years of age, unbroken, violent. Killed three on apprehension, killed another while chained along the journey north. “But no one liked him, anyway,” Bortas adds with a wink, and the crowd laughs and jeers. No one believes him, not really; she can see it in their faces. Her best hope. Her only hope, to be bought by someone who will underestimate her. Someone she can charm into releasing the damned noose around her neck, no matter the cost in the charming.
Her jaw creaks. She never should have patrolled the cliffs alone. Even Anders had offered to come, gaunt and worry-worn as he’d been, and she’d shaken her head. He’d had such important work waiting for him at the clinic. Such need of a reprieve. Such…
Six weeks, and her neck burns like fire.
Bortas calls her some word she does not know. The crowd murmurs, intrigued, and he turns back to face her. “Show them,” he commands.
“Shan’t,” she says, with a smile so sharp one of the unbearded men in the front row flinches. “Even if I knew what you wanted.”
Bortas smiles back, close-lipped, and runs one hand across her stomach, up between her breasts. His heavy rings are ice-cold through her shift. Then he takes her by the throat, just below the brass collar. “You will show them your magic,” he says in soft, accented trade, “or I will chain you to this block and leave you here for them until dawn tomorrow, and then I will sell whatever is left of you for houndsmeat.”
It is a shockingly effective threat, and fear grips her as tight as his hand as he releases her. “And how,” she starts in her broken Tevene, and is perversely pleased her voice doesn’t tremble, “with this collar around my neck, would you like me to do that?”
His hand returns to her neck, but this time it is only to place his thumb on the grooved socket at the front of the collar. He closes his eyes, twists his thumb a quarter turn, and—there. Just a wisp of power, the faintest memory of a memory—nothing she can do anything with except to prove that it exists at all. His threat still rings in her ears.
Hawke pinches a bit of blue soulfire out of the air, even that straining the edges of her ability now, and holds it as best she can in her palm before her. The crowd oohs and aahs, sufficiently impressed, and Bortas steps back, pleased. For the best, perhaps. If they do not know the strength of her magic at full force, her chances might be better to kill whomever buys her here today. So long as Bortas is paid by then, he will not care; he’s grinning at her now, gold-capped teeth gleaming in the clear Tevinter sun.
“How you hate me, my girl,” he says softly, and covers her hand with his own to snuff out the flame. She recoils from his touch, staggers, and straightens again. The man in the front no longer looks so cowed. “She does hate me,” he repeats to the crowd, much louder, and doffs a grand bow. “But I can tell you from experience, my lords and ladies, that she fears death more than the wounding of her pride, and she’ll behave for you with the right incentive.” He makes a lewd gesture, bows again, then grasps the hem of her white shift and yanks it upwards. “You see, she is prepared for you in every way.”
The brass chain around her waist prevents him reaching farther, but the crowd doesn’t particularly care. The leers turn darker, edged in violence; the man at the front meets her eyes and gives a vulgar lick of his lips. She holds his gaze, staring long enough he eventually drops his eyes and looks to his fellow, but nothing can prevent the scarlet flush from flooding her face and chest. Not even the rage is enough here after so long; that shield has gone thin and thready against the weight of utter shame, and Bortas knows it.
“Poor girl,” he says, smiling. “It wouldn’t hurt so much if you’d quit fighting it.”
She hates him. She hates him, she hates him, and he smacks her bare ass once more, just because he can, before finally dropping the shift. She can’t even speak through the hatred, but she’ll be burned alive at the stake before she gives him the satisfaction of her tears.
“Make another the whipping girl for her,” Bortas adds, his voice carrying over the dozens of upturned faces, “and she’ll even sing a song for you while you fuck her.”
They roar at that, slapping their knees and knocking shoulders with their fellows. Robes heavy with gold filigree brush against bright-dyed silk suits; staffs, light and dark, are pounded into the sandy road; one man’s beard, braided heavily with gold beads, glints in the light as he laughs, openmouthed.
Hawke grins so that all her teeth show, wild with fury. The laughter begins to die away; Bortas shakes his head. “What? Cowed, are you, by a Marcher bitch?”
“Try me,” Hawke snarls.
The rest of the levity dims, the nearest two or three stepping discreetly away from her reach, and too late Hawke realizes she should have simpered, should have cried and whined and pleaded until even the weakest man with a deep purse could be swayed. But to give Bortas the satisfaction—to see him pleased by her broken resolve—she can’t. She can’t.
Bortas smiles again, because even this is a victory for him, and turns at last to the bidding. She will open at twenty solidii. An insulting price; the cost of one night at a decent inn. She knows she is worth more. She checks herself—better to be glad the price is so low—the better to deceive her buyer. No, she is insulted—she is bitterly angry—what is wrong with her, she is the Champion of Kirkwall, not chattel to be proud of her price as she’s sold—
She tilts her face up to the sky and closes her eyes. A blue sky today, cloudless, warm. A breeze tosses the ends of her hair playfully, bringing a whiff of salt air untouched by rank sweat and misery. They’d let her keep her hair, one of the few in the sixty-odd slaves she’d travelled with, because they’d liked the look of her with it. Everyone else they’d shaved on acquisition, then shaved again this morning to fend off the lice. She and the other three, two women and a man, had been doused in kerosene to kill the nits. She’d almost reached for fire, then, just to be done with it all, before the brass collar had driven her to her knees with agony. Talmet had beaten her bloody afterwards for the impertinence. Her back still burns where the rod broke her skin.
Funny. If she tries hard enough, she almost can’t make out the words. Forty solidii. Fifty. Fifty-five. Sixty. Sixty leaves fallen from the fig trees that line the streets here, perhaps. Sixty stones scattered along a seabed, worn smooth by a thousand years of waves.
Sixty-five solidii. The price of a good horse with new shoes thrown in.
“Seventy,” says a man to her left, and every nerve ending in her body strikes like a sounding trumpet. Only the barest lingering shred of rage keeps her head tipped back, her eyes shut. She loosens her fingers where they’ve knotted into her chains by force of will alone.
She might be mistaken. She could be, and if she is—
“Eighty,” calls a woman, far in the back, with a jade-green veil and a proud red mouth who scorns the crowd’s heckling. “I’ve need of new breeding stock for my incaensor.”
“Eighty-five.”
“Ninety.”
“Ninety-five,” says the voice again, coolly disinterested, and Hawke counts to a slow thirty in her head before allowing herself to look.
Don’t linger. Don’t stay too long. As if he were the same as all the rest, and just as hated—
There.
He’s dressed himself in black, mostly unornamented. A heavy cambric shirt with a high collar and wide sleeves which gather tightly at his wrists; loose black pantaloons tucked into knee-high grey boots. A wide grey sash, knotted and re-knotted so that the tail falls asymmetrically at one hip; a stiff-shouldered sleeveless overcoat, also high-collared, trimmed in black and gold. Black gloves, one hand wrapped comfortably around an expensive, simply-carved staff. A thick, dark scarf even in the Tevinter sun to disguise the markings over his chin. A fashionable mantíla wrapped over hair she knows is white as bone, banded artlessly loose so that the twists and folds of fine grey wool well hide his pointed ears. His green eyes are trained on Bortas, heavy-lidded, as if bored beyond belief.
Then Fenris glances at Hawke, just for an instant, and she must clench her eyes shut against the pain.
Hate him. Hate him as much as you do the rest, or you are both lost.
A hundred and fifteen. A hundred and twenty. The proud woman waves Bortas away, disgusted. The lecher in the front row, the one who’d licked his lips, bids a hundred and thirty and tells her he will have her broken within a week. His friend gives an uneasy laugh.
A hundred and forty. A hundred and forty-five. An expensive violin, or a fine gold alchemical scale.
The man in the front yanks his purse from his waist, searches through it with a finger before looking up triumphantly. “I’ll give you the purse! A hundred fifty, and not a sester more!”
Fenris scoffs and makes a dismissive gesture at them all. “Have her,” he says, shaking his head. “May you be bitten every night for the pleasure.”
The crowd laughs, and Bortas hooks a finger into the thick chain between Hawke’s wrists. “No higher, my lords?” he wheedles. “She’s spirited enough for two, after all.”
“I do not share,” Fenris says acidly, and the man in the front row gives a cheer. “Nor will I be cheated in a marketplace by an overpriced sale.”
“As you will, lord,” says Bortas, conciliatory as if he were the Archon himself, and turns back to the man in the front. “For final sale, then, ser—”
“Eugh,” says Fenris, his annoyance palpable, and lifts one hand to arrest Bortas mid-word. “If I am to be cheated, let me at least win the prize. One hundred sixty-five, and she keeps the chain. I have none of my own with me.”
“My lord,” Bortas says gleefully, and the long tail of his hair falls smooth over his shoulder as he gives a flourishing bow. Hawke curls her lip and looks away from them both. The pulse jumping wildly in her throat must be only from rage and dread. Nothing else. Nothing less.
The man in the front searches his purse again, shouts in inarticulate frustration, and swivels to search blindly for Fenris over the onlookers clustered between them. “Look me up,” he calls, both grease-stained hands cupped around his mouth. “Dexton of Brucilia, if you leave anything of her when you’re through! I’ll pay you half back again!”
By now Fenris has made his way through the crowd, the assembled buyers parting before him easily. She doesn’t know if there are real magisters here, if perhaps they think he might be one instead in his expensive, understated clothing, his finely-worked staff in hand. He certainly has the bearing for it, his face cold enough to freeze stone. He doesn’t even look up at her.
Hate him. Hate him.
“Sold to my lord,” says Bortas, grinning so broadly his gold teeth glitter, and oh, but that hate comes so easily, even here. The heat races back to her cheeks along with all the powerless anger, and Hawke digs her fingernails deep into her palms as Bortas kneels and pulls her bill of sale from his waist-pouch. “If my lord will sign here, and here, and here. One hundred sixty-five solidii, and my very appreciative gratitude for your business. What name shall you have for her?”
“It doesn’t matter. What have you called her until now?”
“Caerula, lord, for her eyes. She refused to give us her name. Or rather, she gave too many, and even the lash couldn’t make her settle on the truth.”
“Caerula, then. Though this speaks ill of your ability to control your wares.”
“But see her rare beauty,” Bortas wheedles, and Fenris snorts at the obvious untruth. “Her power, then, and her body. She’ll serve you well, lord, I swear, and I’ll enter the bill of sale into the house of records before closing today. A quick, clean purchase. Nothing drawn out.” He proffers the papers once more.
Fenris signs. He holds the pen comfortably, gracefully, and when he is finished he pulls a heavy sack from his belted sash and carelessly counts out the Tevinter coin. The thwarted buyer’s eyes bulge from his head. “Venhedis,” he exclaims, elbowing his goggling friend, “the lord’s filthy! And you couldn’t spare one Marcher cunt for a poor lonely tradesman?”
He puts one friendly hand on Fenris’s shoulder, and Fenris goes as still as the etchings of bound slaves in the stone wall above them. “Touch me again,” he says quietly, without looking, “and I will flay you to the bone.”
The man jerks his hand back as if burnt, white-faced, and scowls. The crowd has gone very quiet. “Be off with you then,” he snaps, as if it might cover the sudden fear, “and may she pox your prick until it bursts.”
Fenris lifts his eyes to meet the other man’s sneer, and after a moment the man ducks his head and stumbles away, closely followed by his friend. The crowd’s chatter resumes. Bortas makes a rude gesture after him, obviously intent on keeping the expensive lord’s good favor. “Here, ser,” he says, grasping Hawke’s lead, and he pulls so hard that she stumbles from the block, fails to right herself, and falls.
She manages to get her bound hands out just in time to avoid smashing her face into the wooden planks, but she’s not quick enough to dodge Bortas’s kick to her ribs. “Off,” he hisses at her yelp. “Wretch. Prostrate yourself properly or I’ll throttle the next girl in line.”
He knows well how to threaten her; she knows from experience he will follow through, occasionally even after he’s already won her compliance. Hawke closes her eyes and slides carefully from the stage to the dirt, then down to her knees, bending forward until her forehead brushes over the grey braided leather of Fenris’s boot. “This slave is grateful,” she says, her Tevene as rough as the sand-choked street. The stone is gritty, hot with sun against her bare knees; her back burns like fire at the unwelcome stretch to torn skin. She knows the white shift is spotted with blood between her shoulder blades, wonders vaguely if Bortas will beat her again for it before she goes.
“Get up,” Fenris snaps, imperious and irritated, “before you embarrass yourself further. If you’ve wasted my coin, slaver—” he adds to Bortas in open threat as Hawke stumbles to her feet, and Bortas puts up both hands in entreaty. The crowd already has turned its attention to the next sale behind, a tall man with pale skin and empty eyes being hustled to the block by Talmet. He’d not spoken a word to Hawke in six weeks despite being chained together for most of it. She doesn’t even know his name.
“Never so, my lord, Archon’s eye upon me.” Bortas bows again, forces Hawke to follow suit with a rough shove to the nape of her neck. “Threaten another with her pain and she’ll bend to your every word. My tongue rot if I lie.”
Fenris huffs, but accepts the small brass key Bortas offers, as well as a copy of his receipt and a short length of looped leather to clip to her lead. “We will see.”
Bortas bows again, then turns back to his stage and the chattel still stood upon it. Fenris slips the leather loop around his wrist, his lip curled, and without another word leads the way out into the Cytates street proper, Hawke, still chained, stumbling helplessly behind him.
—
The tight chain at her ankles makes her take four or five mincing steps for every one of his, and she can’t keep up with his brisk walk. The third time she stumbles, visibly jerking Fenris off his pace, he backhands her across the cheek. It’s a real blow, hard enough to snap her head to the side before she goes down like a sack of bricks. Her elbow smashes into the cracked stone of the street; a few passersby complain as they are forced to weave around her sprawl. The rest of the traffic continues unabated; the merchants in their stalls on either side continue their calls for exotic spices and roasted nuts arranged in colorful, steaming jars, for jewels scattered across mirror-bright trays to throw back the sunlight in fractal rainbows, for silk and brocade shawls draped over every surface in every color imaginable. Fenris stands above her, a shadow against the sun, a total stranger who has just struck her to the ground.
She’s shocked at her own relief. It’s not an act, not like this; there’s nothing left in her for subterfuge, for the stone-heavy weight of one last played part. Not that she’d ever been good at such things anyway.
He raises his hand again, open threat, and Hawke cringes away. “Please,” she begs, still in her broken Tevene, “please. I will do better. I will—the chains—I will do better.”
Fenris stares at her, his eyes opaque and unreadable, his jaw tensed. A new master to an untested slave, untamed, untrained, wondering if she is worth the cost to his pride in this open market.
“Master,” Hawke pleads. His eyes don’t even flicker. A merchant in orange robes passes by, jostles Hawke’s shoulder roughly to clear the walk, and scoffs at them both for the disruption. An obvious old irritation, easily forgotten in a city where such things happen every hour. “I will serve you, master.”
“Get up,” he says, his voice flat. “Fall again and I will stake you to the ground where you lie.”
She swallows and rises to her feet. The few onlookers that had been turned their way before, vaguely insulted that a slave should so inconvenience her master, turn back and resume their errands, satisfied that she has been taught her place. Bustling citizens dutifully fill the space she has left behind, flowing in and out of each other like water, and she is forced to step closer to Fenris to keep the lead slack. He turns without acknowledgement and strides forward once more, ever-so-slightly slower, just enough that she can keep pace without tripping.
A handful of Tevinter carriages line the end of the market street, narrow and square in the city’s style with a pair of blindered horses each, and Fenris leads the way to one three or four back in the line where the driver appears neither drunk nor particularly bright. A couple has already boarded ahead of them, their two athletic male slaves taking the lifted seat behind the box as their place; there is no room for Hawke between them, and, as Fenris points out to the stolid driver, such a new purchase—especially of a once-freewoman—could hardly be trusted not to attempt escape.
The man agrees, his thick head bobbing up and down, and his eyes light even further at the coin Fenris presses into his hand. “But she sits on the floor,” the man insists, wrinkling his nose at her odor and her blood-stained shift. Fenris does not protest, and it is apparently common enough practice that the couple already seated inside the carriage do not comment, though the wife appears visibly annoyed and tucks her slippered feet under her skirts.
“Back to the far wall,” Fenris says, voice curt, and Hawke scrambles to obey. “Make yourself small. Smaller,” he snaps, and she hurriedly tucks her knees up to her chin and pulls her elbows in as tight as she can. “Eyes down. Do not move again.”
Another relief. She buries her forehead in her knees and closes her eyes, carefully shutting away the parts of her mind eager to begin turning over the trauma of the last six weeks. They are not safe yet; not even close. There will be time for the grief later, for the despair to overwhelm. Let her be nothing here instead, just a little longer. No sorrow. No fear. Quiet, quiet, quiet.
Fenris settles onto the hard bench at her side, his staff laid longwise above the back of the seat in its rest, and crosses one leg over the other impatiently. Between the fine embroidery of his overcoat and the sheer expense of the rest of his clothes, he is every inch the disgruntled magister. The carriage lurches as the driver swings into his seat and calls to his horses, then kicks into motion as they pull away from the line. The man across from Fenris asks, “A new buy?”
“Yes,” Fenris says, and she hears him sigh. “A poor impulse, I think. I wished to best another bidder rather than acquire the slave that came with the victory.”
The man makes an understanding noise; his beaded, gilt-embroidered slipper taps idly on the floor beside her foot. “So goes it, sometimes. I myself have twin field hands I bought as boys because Iratia liked their look. Didn’t even have a field proper at the time.”
The woman sniffs and looks out the carriage window. “Sweet eyes, they had,” she says, her voice sharp. “A matched set. I knew they would grow straight and strong.”
“Yes, yes,” her husband says, waving a hand. “And so they grew, and so a field was sown for them to work. We take our usefulness where we can. And our pleasures, hm?” he adds to his wife, needling. A shift of expensive fabric as she turns her head, a quick, irritated exhale, but she does not answer.
“Iratia disapproves that I am not jealous,” he tells Fenris, an obvious smile in his voice. “Sometimes there can be no pleasing a woman. Are you married, magister?”
“No.”
He chortles. “A wise man! You see, Iratia? He buys his playthings before the wedding.”
“Parnenon, please.”
“Oh, fine, fine. Have it your own way, my dear. Our Maker knows you indulge my proclivities often enough.”
She sighs again, but soon enough her husband turns the conversation to the heat of the afternoon, to the peace of the countryside and the filth of the city, to the stormclouds that have threatened from the south for two days. Fenris answers politely, unmemorably, and Hawke lets the words wash over her, constant and formless as the sea. She cannot even revel in listening to Fenris’s voice after so long; to open the door to that relief would bring the rest with it before she is ready, and once that crush strikes her there will be no stopping it. Her cheek burns where Fenris struck her.
Hate him like all the rest. Hate him a little longer. You are strong enough for this.
Another quarter-hour passes before they reach their first destination, and Parnenon and his wife disembark with polite farewells at an open thermopolium near the heart of the city. The smell of roasting meat and salted vegetables wafts through the carriage to make her mouth water, but the driver shuts the door behind them before it can grow too strong for her to bear. The carriage jostles as the slaves disembark the back box, again as the driver retakes his seat, and then they’re moving once more.
“Stay there,” Fenris says quietly, still in Tevene.
She does. Safer this way, should the driver glance behind, should another passenger board unexpectedly. Easier, too. The moment he is gentle she will shatter apart into a thousand pieces, like a mirror flung to his feet.
This journey is longer. She doesn’t know how long—half an hour at least, she guesses, if the way the sun bakes across her bent back through the carriage window is any indication—but it’s long enough that when they finally draw into some unknown courtyard, gravel crunching under the carriage wheels, she struggles to unfold stiff arms, stiff hips, and her neck cracks as she lifts her head.
Her eyes are bleary too, pressed hard into her knees for too long, and she can barely make out the shape of the driver as he pulls open the carriage door and offers an obsequious arm to Fenris. “And you, out,” the driver adds to Hawke more sharply, lip curled as she crawls her shaky way from the carriage, struggles to stand on knees suddenly made of rubber. Another clink of coins as Fenris pays the driver for the rest; another crunch of loose stone as the carriage disappears back down the road. Hawke blinks again and again, trying to clear her vision, and only barely manages to catch herself as Fenris, lead in black-gloved hand once more, begins to walk towards the building on the far end of the courtyard.
An inn, she realizes, as the swinging placard at last resolves itself into a dark-painted, five-faceted diamond. An old inn, well outside Cytates proper given the overgrown trees and fields that butt up against it on every side, but perhaps still within its legal borders. Cytates is moderate enough in size, but its active, bustling slave market is its heart, and only a few miles from its main streets the businesses begin to dwindle into more scattered residences and occasional public lodgings. She thinks they are further south than they were—the distant stormclouds certainly seem darker, more robust—but she has little sense of direction at the best of times, and none at all from the floor of a too-small carriage. To be out of the city is victory enough.
The courtyard is narrow, lined in cracked, age-stained marble benches, and discolored gravel surrounds a round central fountain that once held four stone dolphins leaping towards a center urn. Only two dolphins are left, the others broken and missing, and the urn has split, a long, jagged gash splintering down one side; water still trickles plaintively from the gap into the surrounding leaf-choked pool, not quite fetid but tinged a decided green. The building itself stands two stories tall, long and shallow, once-cream clay walls and rounded terracotta roof tiles now stained alike to a dingy, aged brown, broken only where wisteria has overgrown the brick in a purple cloak. Scaffolding has been erected on one end where a handful of roof tiles are visibly displaced, though the rickety ties to its joists suggest it is as in poor a shape as the rest.
The main doors, though, are made of stout wood and well cared for, and when Hawke follows Fenris into the shadowed interior she is surprised to find it much better maintained than the outside. The walls here are good wood, stained a golden gleaming brown in the late afternoon sunlight; red curtains frame iron-wrought windows, and brocaded rugs soften the floor’s stone pavers. A cheerful fire dances in a broad hearth across the main room, three or four pots bubbling over on a rack atop it, and several chairs and couches, patched and worn but clean, have been arranged invitingly around its warmth.
A man enters from a far hallway and bustles towards them, sturdy and thick-bearded, wiping his hands on his apron before untying it and tossing it over a chair. He wears good cloth beneath, not very expensive but carefully tailored, and a single gold chain around his neck. A far cry from her brass collar, Hawke thinks, not without bitterness, and is genuinely shaken when Fenris snaps the lead hard between them.
“Where,” he says to her softly, dangerous threat in every word, “do you look, slave?”
“Master,” she gasps, and immediately fixes her eyes to the braiding across the toes of his leather boots. “I’m sorry.”
“Be quiet. Good afternoon, ser. Are you the landlord here? I am told you have rooms.”
“Yes, magister,” says the man. A deep voice, rough as his gravel courtyard. “We’re only four in house tonight, so your lordship may have his choice for the rest. One night only?”
“Yes. I must travel hard tomorrow. However, I have found myself saddled with this—” he jerks the lead again, and Hawke stumbles a step nearer, “—and so must establish certain…boundaries tonight before continuing.”
“Of course, magister.” The innkeeper moves behind a large polished desk, pulls a ledger from a locked drawer, and turns the page for a new entry. “I’ve a room on the second floor that will do well for you, magister, if I may recommend it to you. Very fine, very private.” The man pauses, glances between them, and adds more quietly, “Thick walls, should it please you, my lord.”
Fenris gives a cold smile in answer, and a shudder runs lazily down Hawke’s spine. It does not matter that she knows his heart better than her own; there is a promise of pain in that smile, and she fears it. “I will take it. I sent a boy on with my bags this morning in anticipation; he should be here within the hour. I wish for them to be delivered immediately.”
“Yes, magister. Should I have your girl fetch them when they come?”
“This thing? She would run the instant the lead left my hand.” He smiles again, icy, displeased. “Have the bags brought to me. She will be otherwise occupied.”
Her stomach churns; she does not fight the horror and revulsion she knows bleed across her face. The innkeeper’s eyes flash for a moment with pity, but it’s buried all too swiftly in businesslike attention as he picks up his pen. “What name shall I lodge, magister?”
“Dimonidus of Carastes. The slave is Caerula.”
“A long journey indeed, magister. May the Maker guide you home safely enough.” He drops the pen back in its well and blots the ink. “You honor my house with your presence tonight. My daughter will show you to your room. Dusana?”
A slip of a girl pushes away from the doorway to their left, and Hawke flinches in real surprise, flinches again at the resulting streak of fire down her back. A woman perhaps in her early twenties, fine-boned, with black hair in a glossy bun at the nape of her neck; medium olive skin, just a touch darker than Fenris’s, and eyes as black as sloe. Her lips press tightly together in disapproval as she bows to Fenris. “Magister,” she echoes, “I welcome you and yours to our home.”
Fenris barely looks at her. “The room.”
“I will show you, magister.”
She takes them into the sitting room with the grand hearth. A staircase on the far wall leads to the second story, the same polished gold wood as the walls and the balustrade carved with dancing figures. Fenris follows Dusana up the steps without remark, his staff tapping on each step, and it is not until the lead snaps taut around his wrist that they realize Hawke has not come along.
She stands at the bottom step, helpless. The chain is too tight around her ankles for her to take the stair’s height; with her hands still bound at her waist she cannot even grip the railing for stability. She looks up to Fenris, down again at her bare, dirty feet, and up once more, unsure of what words she might use to beg.
Fenris waits, eyebrow lifted almost to the grey-wool scarf that hides his hair, and says nothing. Dusana stands a step above, a muscle jumping in her jaw. It is an excruciating moment, dragged out so long Hawke thinks she might as well die here and let the ash be blown into the hearth with the rest; at last, Fenris says, “Well?”
She must try, then. He would not wait if it could not be done. And indeed, though it is the most graceless she has ever been, she discovers if she stands on the toes of one foot, and turns to the side just so, she can eke the edge of the other onto the lip of each step enough to take her weight. It is slow going, slow enough Fenris eventually hands her her own lead and goes to wait on the landing above with Dusana. They watch her without speaking, and the tide-rough rise of new humiliation washes over her.
Still, she eventually gains the landing, and Fenris takes up her lead again without comment. The second floor is partially open to the room below, the balustrade continuing along a small balcony that overlooks the hearth so that it may warm both levels at once. Dusana leads them down the broad central hallway, past a half-dozen empty rooms, to the very end of the building. One door has been set here, a little finer than the rest, and it is this door she unlocks and opens wide, bowing again to Fenris as she gestures him to enter.
He does, unimpressed, and Hawke follows. The room is large indeed. A satisfyingly plump four-poster bed has been set central in the far wall, elegant nightstands on either side holding twin candelabra and a basin and ewer of clean water. Late afternoon sunlight pours in through the open windows over a large dresser and wardrobe, both in the same carved style as the stairs; a slim writing desk with paper invitingly arranged atop its surface; a second fireplace behind an iron grating, smaller than the great room’s below but with fresh logs and no whiff of errant smoke. A small settee has been placed before the fire, a wooden armchair to its right with a homemade quilt folded over one arm. As comfortable a room as she has seen since Kirkwall, Hawke thinks.
Kirkwall. She hasn’t thought of the city in weeks. Her world has narrowed to only each hour at a time, no more, and—no. Not yet. Not yet. Fenris is speaking; let that be the only thing that matters for a little longer.
“—to wash?” he asks Dusana. “As you can see, it is not something that may be delayed much longer.”
“Yes, lord,” Dusana says, and with a deferential bow she opens the room’s second door. A small, furnished bathing room has been attached to the suite, Hawke realizes, luxurious privacy for the inn’s most honored guests. The bathtub is large, made of ceramic and copper, gleaming in the light thrown by the high, rippled-glass windows lining the room; a slender table along one wall holds trays of hair oils, soaps, sandstone, and several folded towels. Even the floor’s blue and grey checked tiles shine with fresh wax.
“No pump,” Fenris says, annoyed.
“No, lord, but there is a drain, and when you are ready I will have the men fill the tub. We have a rune-set furnace downstairs to heat the water. It will take no more than a few minutes.”
Fenris gives a noncommittal hum, turns back to the main room, and nearly collides with Hawke where she stands obediently at his back. She staggers, trying without success to get out of his way, and he shoves past her in irritation. “Move aside,” he snaps, thrusting her lead at her once more, and waves a hand at the wall. “Find a corner and stand in it. Be still until I want you.”
“Master,” she whispers, and goes. Dusana watches in angry silence, slim black brows drawn low, but does not argue, and when Fenris returns his attention to the innkeeper’s daughter Hawke surreptitiously leans against the painted wainscoting. It’s cool against her bare arms, soothing on her sore back. She is privately grateful for the dismissal; the horror is closer now than it has ever been, oppressive in her mind as a storm surge heaving against the dam, and the last threads of her control are rapidly beginning to fray. She closes her eyes, rests her temple against wood, and scrapes together the last of her resolve.
A cheerful young voice down the hall calls for the magister Dimonidus: the boy Fenris had mentioned earlier, dirty to the hairline and grinning through two missing teeth as he delivers Fenris’s bags. Dusana directs him where to place the luggage, a large, square case with reinforced hinges and a smaller rucksack with broad straps, fine leather tooling etched across its face. Hawke’s gift to Fenris last year for Satinalia; she’d told him to carry more with him than old grudges. Fenris pays the boy when he is through, barely looking at him, and ignores the curious glance he gives Hawke as he leaves. His whistle carries down the hallway long after he is gone.
“Anything else, my lord?”
Fenris stifles a bored yawn behind an elegant hand, moves to lean his staff against the edge of the writing desk. “Have the bath drawn. Hot. I wish to rid myself of this road dust immediately. Does an inn such as this stock both salts and scent?”
The question positively drips condescension, and Dusana flushes. “Of course, magister.”
“Bring them both. And a pair of buckets filled with fresh water.” He pauses, casts a critical eye over Hawke in the corner. “Three buckets, perhaps.” Her turn to color, ashamed; she has never smelled so terrible in her life. Fenris continues, uninterested in her humiliation. “And a hot meal. Whatever your kitchens have prepared will be sufficient. I do not require a separate menu.”
Magnanimity itself. “Yes, magister,” Dusana says again, but hesitates. “Shall I bring food for her as well?”
Now Fenris looks at the innkeeper’s daughter, a half-glance as sharp as a turned blade. His voice is even, smooth. “You are very concerned for the well-being of my slave.”
Dusana, perhaps sensing the danger in that impeccable control, drops her eyes. “Only so that you are well served, magister.”
“Hm. You may bring her something adequate.”
“My gratitude, magister.”
Fenris smiles without amusement. “Indeed. Then I will add this: once the food is delivered and the bath drawn I do not wish to be disturbed again tonight. I will block the door if necessary. If I discover that anyone in this household has approached this room before noon tomorrow without my express permission, I will have them skinned inch by inch in the arena’s heart until they are dead.” He waits, allowing the full force of the threat to sink in, then asks in the same cool tone, “Do you understand me, Dusana?”
“Yes, magister,” Dusana whispers, pale as a sheet beneath her olive coloring, though the look she throws Hawke in her corner is open pity. “I swear, you and your slave will not be disturbed.”
“Your consideration for Caerula’s comfort remains gratifying.” A clear warning in that, and Dusana knows it; she ducks her head and withdraws without another word, leaving the door cracked behind her.
Within a quarter-hour, all is as Fenris has requested. Two men in aprons fill the tub quickly with water so hot it must near boiling; steam gently scented with lemon and sandalwood wafts out into the main room with every pass through the door. The buckets are brought, filled, and lined up neatly on the tile beside the tub; a moment later Dusana knocks and enters with another girl behind, both carrying trays loaded with food. Fenris’s plate is obvious enough, teak inlay lining the platter and runed silver cloches covering each dish to keep in the heat; a decanter of chilled wine follows, its silver belly already beading water against the warmth spilling out of the bathing room.
A second tray is placed on the floor by Hawke’s filthy feet. Unsanded pine, that one, with a small bowl of overboiled vegetables, a cup of water, and a little wooden plate of cold-cut chicken. Still a better meal than she’s had in weeks, and her stomach loudly protests even this delay. Neither Fenris nor Dusana notice.
“The bellpull is by the bed, magister,” Dusana says respectfully, though her eyes are trained on the red rug. “There are servants awake around the clock to meet any of your needs; you have only to ask.”
“My needs will be met tonight without your assistance,” Fenris says, still smiling, a soft and dangerous promise. “You may go.”
Dusana sucks in a breath through her teeth. “Magister,” she murmurs again with a bow, and she withdraws, closing the door behind her.
And just like that, at last—they are alone.
—