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“Silverite Wings of Valor?” Aria Trevelyan asked. “What did you get those for?” Part of her knew already the answer she’d get: nothing new to tell Leliana, no details from the excursion to seal the Deep Roads.
“For … valor,” he said. Once she would have been disappointed, but her expectations had changed. She’d expected the lie, just not that it would be so feeble.
“Care to elaborate?” Aria asked. She pressed him, but what she meant was never so much Aha, I’ve got you now, you bastard. It was more a plea to tell the truth, at last, to make sense of the doubts that grew in her heart.
“It was a different time,” he said, weary. “Back when we didn’t stop to gloat about past victories with an assassin on the loose.” There was chastisement in his tone, the weight of his seniority laid like a blade between them.
Aria palmed the key to the servant’s quarters and lofted a brow back at him. “We could do something about that.”
— — — — —
Several hours and three assassins later, Aria paused to catch her breath. The palace guards had carried away the Duchess de Chalons like a bad dream, and she was the toast of Halamshiral. It was headier than the Antivan brandy they insisted on filling her cups with: she, last child of the Bann of Ostwick, had hardly been the belle of her own debut. When the festivities drew on through the night and her feet hurt from dancing and cheeks ached from smiling, Aria withdrew to the balcony.
The fingers of dawn had just begun to touch the sky beyond the palace’s walls. Her own hands found the golden rail of the balcony and she leaned on them, carefully stretching her legs. She heard footsteps behind her and turned. One hand burned with the Anchor, the other for an arrow from the quiver not at her belt.
The man calling himself Blackwall looked at her with tired eyes, and she let her tense arms drop to her sides. Whatever else she believed, he still wouldn't hurt her on purpose.
That was not quite enough for her to forgive him.
“There are a dozen young lords and ladies still hoping for some time with the hero of the night. Yet I find you here, alone. Care to share your thoughts?” he said as he drew up beside her. He was more comfortable in the stiff crimson brocade of the uniform than she’d expected, lifting his shoulders as he leaned forward so that it didn’t pull across his back.
“I’m just tired,” she said, gazing at him. The lines on his face were deep in this light, graven upon him as plainly as his affections for her. “It’s been…a very long night.” She wanted to laugh, but offered instead a watery smile that strained her aching face.
“You work too hard.”
Aria shook her head. “With what we face, there’s no such thing.”
“Before we leave, Lady Trevelyan, may I have this dance?”
He stretched his hand out and she froze, because otherwise she’d have taken it in an instant. There was temptation there, as strong as his arms around her. She could forget what she knew and ignore her aching feet and do this, because he loved her.
“I want to be alone,” she said instead, and watched the sunrise, retreating footsteps falling on deaf ears.
— — — — —
They left Halamshiral a day later, and when much of her retinue went east toward Skyhold, she turned west for Lydes, and thence to Val Royeaux once more, their numbers much diminished. Vivienne had cited business with the Council of Heralds and suggested Aria visit the city. It had been an easy sell, all told—the Dowager had made a request of her that required an Inquisition presence in Orlais, and Josephine had promised audiences to a select few noblemen and Chantry officials there. She had always wanted to see the Grand Cathedral, and the city was a welcome change from the chill of the Emprise du Lion, and a respite besides.
She took dinner in the Masque du Lion, beneath the Grand Ma’am, and patted her snout for luck when she left each evening, to drink elsewhere. The Lion’s Share was a good deal less buttoned up—the type of place her father might once have warned her from visiting. Still, it was where her paramour spent his evenings, and it was hardly the first time she’d made sure to leave the silver signet ring and earrings in the chest and keep one hand on her coinpurse.
Her ersatz Warden sat brooding in a corner, eyes darker yet than his mood, and grew no lighter when she sat down opposite. An elven server came by a moment later and set a mug of ale in front of her. She nodded her thanks to his receding back and wrapped both hands around the tankard, lifting it to her lips. Like everything else here, she knew what to expect from it.
it was foul, so much so that she wanted to spit and remove the scurf of it from her tongue, but instead set the drink down carefully, taking her hands from it.
He looked at her and sighed.
“What’s on your mind?” Aria asked, lifting a hand to push her bangs back from her face.
“It’s nothing,” he said, and she wanted to scream, to curl the hand in her hair into a fist and yank til the ginger strands broke or pulled free. She did neither, only let her eyes, Anchor-green, rest on him like a weight. “I was thinking about our visit to the Storm Coast,” he said.
“Ah,” she said, and remembered rain and a humidity so thick it was oppressive. She remembered thunder, and the push-pull of whether or not it was wise for this man to get involved with her—and whether she cared so much about what was wise. Wisdom was for the Inquisitor. Aria Trevelyan should still have been allowed some naïveté, and more unguarded moments than those that took place around a card table.
“We went to the ruin. We found the badge,” he said, and at least he had never called it his. She’d realized that only later. “Everything seemed clear then—like I could do anything with you at my side.” He lifted his mug, emptied its contents. With a wave of her hand she removed the burden of asking permission, and he started in on her abandoned drink next. “Anything,” he echoed. “It’s a big word. Means a lot.”
“‘Anything’ is a beginning,” she said, resting her arms on the table, hands open, another invitation he wouldn’t take.
“Not for me.” He was quiet a long time, even while she railed at him, inwardly, to confess. Telling the truth should have been the least of what ‘anything’ might entail. She’d erred again, her expectations yet too lofty. He stood, crossing to her shoulder, and leaned in. His beard tickled at her cheek. “I want you to know … if there’s any good in my life, it came from you. You’ve been an inspiration, and … and so much more.” She reached up, and back, grasping at the nape of his neck, pulling him down against her in an awkward hug. He straightened a moment later, his hand gentle on her wrist, peeling her arm away. “I want to be the man you think I am,” he said, and put something heavy and metal and cold into her hand.
She brought it down, looked at it: an escutcheon of silver, with the twin gryphons of the Grey Wardens embossed on its surface. Her thumb caressed the pinions that spread like rays of light, and she made her mind up: if he wouldn’t tell her without prompting she’d have to ask.
“Then start by telling me who you really are,” she said, quietly, no anger in her voice.
When no reply came she looked back and found herself alone. Aria laid the badge down, ordered a flagon of port that went down like dragon’s blood and roiled in her guts twice as strong, then abandoned the tavern for the quiet of her guest apartments.
— — — — —
She found her bed unexpectedly empty and frowned. Even if they never had made love, she had thought to find him there, to rest with his comfortable weight at her back, his face buried against her neck. Had she demurred too long? She had not thought his patience tested, but his absence watered those seeds of doubt in her heart ’til they became choking vines. One too many refusals from her, or pointed questions, or the bevy of unkind words from Madame Vivienne—what had done this?
She made ready for bed like nothing was the matter, reached for the book at her bedside and thumbed to the ribbon that marked her place. A scrap of paper fell from the pages of the volume, and she closed it, more interested now in the folded note.
His hand was blocky, rugged, as masculine as he had ever been.
There is little I can say that will ease this pain. Just know that while it hurt to leave, it would’ve hurt more if I stayed.
I am deeply sorry.
Blackwall
“How like him to make this decision for me,” she said to the night air, and her voice trembled. She read it twice more, and found that while it certainly hurt her, it did not surprise her. It occurred to her to make haste to Skywall and enlist Leliana’s aid, but she knew he would never return there of his own volition—for what had he left there that was more precious than the things he had abandoned in Val Royeaux?
An hour of fretting, and she resolved at last to visit a rookery. Needs must, and she woke its master, spilling gold into aging hands that tied the close-rolled sheafs of vellum to a crow’s foot and sent it on wing into the night.
— — — — —
When Aria took her morning tea with Vivienne the next morning, the First Enchanter tutted and told Aria to consider herself well rid of the man, but took her on an outing to the bazaar all the same, with the excuse of making good on that promise of introduction to her seamstress. It helped, though standing with arms out as girls in embroidered masks took her measure and pinned fabrics into place left Aria with mind wandering. Nevertheless, whatever melancholy gripped Aria Trevelyan, the Inquisitor kept her engagements and was gracious.
When the spymaster appeared half a week later it was with a sheaf of reports, but she only handed Aria one.
“He’s not Blackwall,” she said. “He never was.”
“I know,” Aria replied, and her eyes scanned over the précis, an overview of a Captain in the Orlesian army. “Thom Rainier?”
“So I can still surprise you,” Leliana said, earning a sharp look from the Inquisitor she served. “He turned himself in to the city guard the night you sent word.”
“Why now?” Aria asked, staring down at the paper in her hands. “This crime is six years old. It seems a bit late for a guilty conscience.”
Leliana dropped another page atop the first: a report in a spindly hand addressed to Nightingale. “They were going to hang his Lieutenant this week. Perhaps he wanted to stop it.”
“I’ll ask him.”
“You’re going to visit him now?” Leliana asked, confused.
“Should I be doing something else?” Aria said.
“I’d be a poor spymaster if I didn’t know what was going on between the two of you, but—Inquisitor, be discreet.”
Understanding dawned after a moment. “They don’t know he’s been with the Inquisition,” she said.
“Not yet.”
“I still need to see him.”
— — — — —
She went alone, dressed plainly, and told no one she was Inquisitor Trevelyan—nor even that she was Aria. The damp air of the nearby lake had leached into the stones, and the donjon stank of mold and despair. It was emptier than she expected until she realized it was temporary, and anyone here was waiting only for the headsman’s axe. That meant him too, and as much as she wanted not to care, something in the hollow of her chest twisted.
At the end of the row he sat in his cell, heavy with irons and regret, and though he’d surely heard her footsteps coming he did not lift his head. Aria stood there a long while and let the silence unwind between them.
“I didn’t take Blackwall’s life,” he said, like he was answering her question from the alehouse. As if that were a conversation one could resume and ignore that circumstances had changed things between them. “I traded his death,” he added. “He wanted to recruit me, but died in a Darkspawn ambush. I took his name to stop the world from losing a good man—but a good man wouldn’t have let another die in his place.”
“So you thought you’d just disappear. That I wouldn’t find you,” she said, voice soft as the footfalls that brought her to the iron bars.
“I didn’t want you to see me like this,” he said.
“You wanted me to think you left me?” she asked, trying and failing to swallow her anger. “That was better?”
“Don’t you understand?” he replied, and rose, hands shaking at his sides. “I gave the order that killed an entire family, and I lied to my men about what they were doing. At the first sign of trouble, I ran. My men paid for my treason while I was off pretending to be someone else. A better man,” he spat bitterly, his hands clutching at the cold iron bars.
She backed away from his vitriol. Her long shadow fell over his face, and she saw the pain in his expression for the first time. “Why?” she asked.
“For money,” he said. “All for gold.” He shook his head. “It was before the War of the Lions. One of Gaspard’s men, a chevalier, employed me to kill one of Celene’s generals. He thought it would endear him to Orlais’ true Emperor, and when Gaspard took the throne this service would be remembered. I didn’t care—there was good coin on the table, and I took it.”
Aria said nothing, ignored the burning of her Anchor and the leaden weight of her heart. She plied him with silence and hoped it would work where questions had failed her.
“He was traveling with his family. I didn’t know—I expected guards, a retinue. Not children. But I had told my men to eliminate everyone, and they thought they were defending their country. It’s ugly to think about, but there’s power in names. In bloodlines and heirs. I guess you’d know that better than most,” he said, lip curling with contempt. “That’s how war is waged.”
“You weren’t at war,” she replied, bristling.
“You’re right,” he said. “There was no need for what I did.”
“And your men?” she asked him then, head canting to one side. “Were they used to killing children?”
“I’d told them it was an important mission. They trusted me. Like your men trust you.”
“I don’t send them to murder children,” she replied. “You’ve been in the field with me more than most. You know the commands I give, out there or at court. If there’s another option, I find it.”
“That’s why you’re the Herald of Andraste, and I am this,” he said. “And this is what I am, Aria! Murderer and traitor and monster. How could these hands take yours? Wouldn’t you be happier thinking I was a good man, a noble man—instead of this? I would have spared you the pain of learning that everything you knew about me was a lie. That you loved a lie.”
She steeled herself. “I never loved you,” she said, and let that ring like a hammer blow, as if its resonance made it easier for her to believe it. It became a lodestone around his neck and dragged him to his knees. “I wanted to, ‘Blackwall,’ but I never could. Because I couldn’t trust you.”
“You took me into the field with you,” he said; “put your life in my hands, over and over. You slept beside me.”
“And I asked you all the questions that never made sense to me,” she said. “Warden Loghain closed the borders after King Cailan died. Every Grey Warden but two died on his orders. One was a hero and one was a drunk, but neither was you: he’d never met you before. You told me you were in Ferelden, but Blackwall was at Val Chevin. I read one of his speeches. That wasn’t the only thing,” she said.
“I wanted to tell you,” he said. “When we went to the ruin. When we found the badge.”
“It was never yours, was it?” she asked, and she could feel the rainfall of the Storm Coast matting her hair to her cheeks, though that outing had been months ago, now. “It was Blackwall’s, left where he fell.”
“I would have explained it to you. Why we could never be together. But I lost my nerve—I wanted to be him. You wanted me to be him.”
“Don’t you dare,” she said, voice cold, tone clipped. It was a long moment before she could speak again, so she could keep her voice from trembling. “Don’t you dare put this on me. All I wanted from you was the truth. I trusted you with my life, but never my heart, because the only thing you ever said to me that was true was that there’s no future in this. But you could never tell me why, and so I dared to hope. But I never loved.”
Aria turned on her heel, and heard his chains rattling behind her like a ghost from a Wintersend tale. But he never asked her to stay. When she emerged blinking into the sunlight there were tears on her cheeks, and she remembered a story Solas had told her. There was no rock in her hands, though, only a more metaphorical burden—and one she could not yet afford to lay down.
— — — — —
“Josephine could ask for a favor, and Cullen has said he could storm the bastion, but I think that creates complications we don’t need. Nobody knows he was with the Inquisition,” Leliana reminded her over tea the next day. “We could solve two problems at once. There is a prisoner we needed to execute, back at Skyhold. They’re of a height and build.”
“Trade his death?” the Inquisitor mused.
“Thom Rainier would die for justice and you could pass whatever judgment you like in your own court.”
“Do it,” she said, because otherwise she’d lose her nerve. “Once we’ve left for Valence, have your men make the switch.”
— — — — —
She was glad enough to go with Leliana to the cloister and hoped it would soothe the tumult inside her, but of all the questions she’d had once there was only one left.
“You knew?” Aria found herself asking the spymaster.
“I knew he wasn’t Blackwall,” Leliana agreed. “So did you.”
“You left reports enough lying around to ensure that,” Aria said. “Why?”
“The truth is sometimes ugly, Inquisitor, but we should see things as they are.”
“You could have told me.”
“You would not have believed me, I fear, and he deserved a chance to tell you.”
“But he didn’t,” she said.
“And so you saw things as they were.”
— — — — —
She put Orlais at her back after Valence and returned to the Frostbacks. Her first day was spent processing dispatches and sending runners to Josephine and Cullen with fresh orders, and waiting to hear of Vivienne’s departure to return. No word came, and Aria told herself she had troubled the First Enchanter enough with her personal issues. She slept fitfully in her empty bed and told herself she had demurred enough.
Since Halamshiral, several Orlesian houses had made gifts of gilded lions and marble plinths, and they flanked the main artery of Skyhold, the leather throne of the Inquisition at the far end. She would have to walk its length and grasp her purpose before they brought him before her. Aria touched her breastbone, felt cool metal, and put one foot in front of the other, back rigid, chin high. She became the Inquisitor, and settled in upon her throne.
“Clear the halls and bring the prisoner,” she said.
They had bound him by the wrists, and it hurt to see. It hurt Josephine, too, if the crease in her brow was any indication. Usually so unflappable, she hesitated, tapping her quill against the slate.
“For judgment today I must present Captain Thom Rainier, formerly known to us as Warden Blackwall. His crimes … well. You are aware of his crimes,” she said, and withdrew.
He did not rise from his knees, his shoulders drawn up and cramped. His passage from Val Royeaux had not been as easy as hers, she could see in an instant.
“Not a word of thanks?” the Inquisitor asked.
“I don’t think I can thank you,” he said, and stood at last to look into her eyes. The firelight of chandeliers and sconces danced across his face. His jaw was clenched, hard to see beneath the beard but for the veins in his neck. “You put another man in my place. Haven’t enough died for me?”
“That’s twice now Thom Rainier’s death has been traded. If I had another option, I would have taken it.”
“You should have left me there—to die! I accepted my punishment. Why stop that? It’s not as though you had a personal stake.”
She didn’t dare flinch, but her hands clenched around red leather. She felt the crackle of the Anchor like fire in her veins.
“You brought me here for judgment, so pass it,” he said. “What becomes of me now?”
Her right hand rose from the throne to the neck of her jacket, and she grasped the metal tucked into its folds. She cast it to the ground between them. It was an escutcheon of silver, embossed with twin gryphons.
“You are in the Inquisition’s debt, and you will be what the Inquisition requires,” she said, with a calm she had not thought to find. “You will remain Blackwall. You will say nothing of Rainier. And neither will we.”
“So I am to live the lie, until you release me from it?”
“It wasn’t my lie,” she said, as cold as the stone beneath her feet, as implacable as the mountains around them.
“Then I shall serve the Inquisition with a humble heart for all my days,” he said, lip curling, but she had the chains struck from him anyway. He drew near enough to take the badge, and strode from her hall.
She sat unmoving for a long time, until the few come to see her judgment dispersed, and when she trusted her legs again she rose.
They carried her to the stables, as they had dozens of times before, but she heard no hammer blow falling upon an awl, making toys for children. As she walked she could hear Vivienne telling her that she’d played well, that this was the best outcome she might have hoped for. That she had kept a private shame as nothing more than that and had not lost a valuable asset. All of which would have satisfied the Inquisitor, and did.
But she was also Aria Trevelyan.
“Blackwall,” she called, entering the loft above the stables, half-expecting to find it empty.
Blackwall sat, a winged helmet in his lap and a cloth in one hand. He did not rise, nor look at her.
“We’re not friends,” he said. “We never will be. Your time would be better spent elsewhere.”
“Probably,” she agreed.
“Madame de Fer will be happy.”
“I don’t think she will,” Aria said. “She might be impressed with what I’ve learned under her tutelage, and she might never have liked you, but she remains a friend and will not take joy where I suffer.”
He grunted. “It’s near enough. Why are you here? I didn’t think we had anything left to talk about.”
“I had hoped…” she began. “If I had not hoped for a future, closure would have been enough. Or at least for honesty. That was what I truly couldn’t forgive you for. You’re hardly the only man under my command to take lives for coin.”
“Do not compare me to the Qunari,” he warned her.
“At least he’s honest.”
“Do you not think Gaspard’s man would have killed me if I refused?” he asked.
“He surely would have,” Aria agreed. “That isn’t what hurts me. Leliana was a Bard before she was a spymaster, and surely has the blood of dozens on her hands; Sera laughs while she kills; Cullen put an entire Circle to the sword once. But they’ve never lied to me about it. I can judge them on their own merits.”
“I can’t take it back now,” he said.
“You could apologize. We could never start over; the future I wanted is ashes at my feet, your past a poison no title can draw, but you could give me that. If you ever cared to.”
“What was the future you wanted?” he asked her after a moment, his hands moving over the metal rays of ersatz wings.
“A dream,” she admitted. “The Dowager is in the middle of ensuring the Inquisition holds a land grant in Orlais. After the war I might have given it to you, with all its incomes. You could have been lord over acres of walnut trees, not far from Montsimmard. We might have married then, and seen Josephine and Vivienne on visits to court. We could have visited the Grand Cathedral for services twice a year and made a pilgrimage to hear them sing the whole of the Chant, the Herald and her Champion. They would have written songs for us, made you into a legend, and we’d have hung a new dragon head next to Madame Snappy-Snips and had a dozen children and lived, if the Calling never came for you as it did for the others. Wardens leave the order. Rarely, but it is not without precedent, even in this age. Or maybe you weren’t one, just a man—and that was enough. That was easier. I wanted that, but I knew for months you’d never even told me your name.”
“And you never asked.”
“Not before you walked away,” she admitted. “Before I knew you had, but still too late. I cannot blame Leliana for that, though she never asked either.”
“I am sorry, Lady Trevelyan,” he said. “I betrayed your trust.”
“So too am I,” Aria said, and resolved to want nothing more for herself.