Chapter Text
Cullen trudged up l’Avenue de la Ruche, pausing at a busy corner to consider his next move. He scowled and drew his surcoat closer around his neck as another tug of the wind tossed his golden hair over his forehead and snuck snowflakes beneath the collar of his gambeson. It was all picturesque enough, he supposed, for Orlesians—though the Maker knew he’d take a quiet Honnleath Satinalia over the glitz and glamor of this strange city in a heartbeat. The broad street fairly throbbed with bodies, even more richly-attired than usual, and it reverberated with shouts and laughter and the clangor of the cheap tin bells vendors as young as six hawked from long ropes. The smells of hot chestnuts and melted butter made his stomach growl. It was a long time since his hard roll and pungent little wedge of cheese, this morning.
Somebody put their hand on his elbow. He jerked away, a rebuke already halfway out of his mouth by the time he registered that the hand belonged to the Inquisitor. The weather had whipped a rosy flush into her cheeks and nose, but beneath the hood of her travel-worn cloak she looked the same way he did—bone-tired and curmudgeonly. “Anything?” he asked, his heart sinking.
She shook her head. “Tried four,” she grumbled. “The fourth innkeeper’s wife was gracious enough to tell me that rooms for the week of the Satinalia festivities were all booked by the end of Bloomingtide. You?”
“Three. Nothing.” He kicked a chunk of compacted snow into the gutter. A quick detour, they’d told each other, in and out of the city in a day. Negotiating directly with a steel merchant of modest but growing importance would save them both a month of tedious correspondence and costly supply chain disruptions. They’d be back at camp before anyone but the senior officers noticed they were gone. They’d forgotten all about the holidays until they’d already seen a hundred candles flickering in as many windows. Thwarting apocalypse had a nasty habit of overshadowing such niceties: a grueling, days-long march from the Western Approach, even more so.
What was it Cullen’s granny used to tell him? Short cuts make long delays? His breath clouded the air when he huffed.
“Maybe we’ll have better luck in the outskirts,” the Inquisitor suggested. The twist of her mouth suggested that her optimistic tone was feigned. She was becoming quite an expert at feigning optimism, lately, Cullen noted. He managed not to roll his eyes at her. Almost. She snorted and stomped down the avenue the way he had come, sublimating whatever it was she really felt into a pace so brisk that the commander, who took one stride for two of hers, was obliged to hurry after her.
“Where are you going, my lady?” he asked, mildly, dodging a small boy wiping a fantastic quantity of snot into his mitten and a crone selling embroidered handkerchiefs.
“The cathedral and marketplace are that way,” she said, pointing. “And it’s all villas and second homes the way I came—and any inns or public houses diminishing the view are liable to be full. That leaves the way I’m going, if we are to sleep in beds and not a doorway tonight. I assume you would be averse to trying to find out if the Templar Order left their barracks behind them when they relocated to Therinfal Redoubt.”
“Very,” he replied, “if it would involve kicking in a door or breaking windows. I’m sure every city guard in Val Royeaux is on duty tonight.”
“You have no spirit of adventure at all, Ser Rutherford,” she said, the haughty tilt of her chin belied by the gleam of amusement that softened her sharp grey eyes.
“The least of my faults, I’m sure.” He was impressed, even if he wasn’t about to admit it. A lifetime of combined confinement and privilege left the Inquisitor with an unusually poor sense of direction: atrophied from lack of practice, Cullen supposed. His scouts’ reports on her early movements through the Hinterlands suggested that Lady Trevelyan spent nearly as much time walking in circles as she did sealing rifts. Her rationale was sensible and the cathedral was in the direction she had pointed out. Better to be quiet and let her lead, if he had no better ideas—which he didn’t. If they did spend Satinalia Eve freezing their asses off in a doorway, he’d rather she didn’t have a ready-made pretext to sharpen that patrician tongue of hers on him, anyways.
He held fast to his silence for nearly half an hour, finally clearing his throat as they passed over a narrow canal, the clatter of their boots on the wooden bridge muffled by new snowfall. “You’re taking us toward the harbor.”
He couldn’t see the Inquisitor’s face under her deep hood, and she kept her eyes forward as they marched past the narrow houses of petty merchants and artisans. “I thought so,” she said.
“We are likely to find more warehouses and fisheries than inns, there.” He cleared his throat, again. Maker take him, he was turning into his father. “And what lodgings we do find—“
She finally looked at him when his faltering didn’t resolve, her pale brows arching. “It can’t possibly be more wretched than the sack of lice that called itself an inn on the road to the Fallow Mire,” she said, “and I stayed there.”
Cullen cursed the heat creeping up the back of his neck. “That’s not—I—I mean that they are likely to be unsuitable for a young lady.” He prayed that she’d take the hint, or his blush was liable to spread to his face—and then he’d never hear the end of it.
She did, after a long moment. Her expression cleared, and she laughed. “Brothels, you mean. I do know what they are, Commander,” she teased, “even if I’ve never seen the inside of one, myself.” He knew that he did blush, then. He could only hope that the weather had disguised it. The Inquisitor ducked under the dingy awning of a butchery, taking advantage of the warmth radiating from the clay furnace a tinker had set up in the alley a few feet away. “I’m not that young, you know,” she said, when they had stolen their breath back from the bitter wind. “And being a lady isn’t worth very much as an ice statue. Besides,” she added, her eyes brightening, “the turnover must be higher, if the clientele doesn’t, ah, sleep there. Surely, if we found some place and waited—”
“Absolutely not,” Cullen sputtered. “And I could waste an hour standing here and listing all the reasons I won’t lounge around in the bar of some whorehouse with—“
“I see,” she interrupted, with a sarcastic flutter of her eyelashes. “So you have another, better plan, then.”
“I—we could try to hire a carriage to take us back to the village where we put up our horses.”
“Mm-hmm. How do you suggest we scrape together the king’s ransom I’m sure such an engagement would cost us tonight?” He had nothing, and she knew it. She dug around theatrically in her cloak. “I’ve got…let’s see…four silvers. How about you?”
“You’ve made your point, my lady,” he sighed. The impossible little baggage beamed at him. Surely she couldn’t be pleased by the prospect of…? Then again, the Inquisitor was one of the most insatiably curious people he’d ever met. In a better mood, it was one of the things he liked about her. Probably, Cullen thought, it excited her that she would at least wring a new experience out of this nightmare, if she had her way.
And maybe it was unfair of him to take full advantage of his considerable height, leaning in to glare daggers down at her, but the whole situation was unfair. Asking him to chaperone his pretty, fresh-faced, sheltered commanding officer through what would undoubtedly be a very long night in an Orlesian red light district was distinctly unfair. “Listen to me. I am not some blushing choir boy, believe it or not, and I’m not especially invested in the—in the marriageability of the Herald of Andraste.”
“Don’t let Josephine hear you say so,” the Inquisitor snorted.
He ignored her. “My first concern is for your safety. We have no troops here and there’s little hope of making other arrangements for your security tonight. We won’t stay anywhere where I’m not reasonably convinced I can protect you. Not if they offer us feather beds and an earldom apiece. Understand?”
For once, she looked chastened, although Cullen was sure it wouldn’t last. “Yes, of course.”
“Good.”
The tinker leaned out from behind his furnace, sooty-faced and unmistakably drunk. He slurred something in Orlesian. It was indistinguishable to Cullen, but whatever he said prompted the Inquisitor to put her hand on his elbow and firmly steer him away. The sun was starting to sink, Cullen noted, the iron-colored sky overhead deepening steadily to purple. He walked a little faster. “What did the tinker say?” he asked, eventually.
Evelyn grinned. “That if you didn’t shut up or give him something to mend, he was going to start throwing things.”
*
Well. You learned something new every day, and today Cullen learned that your average Orlesian gentlemen's club and hostel was a security nightmare. “No,” he muttered in the Inquisitor’s ear, as she attempted to flag down the bartender of the fifth such establishment they’d toured that evening. “Too many entrances and exits. The risk of—“
“Maker’s sake. You are being ridiculous.” She gave the balding man who leaned too far into her opposite shoulder a hard elbow and a warning look. “I’m never going to shut up about the last place. Never. We could be asleep already, if you’d let us disappear into some corner for a few minutes.” Cullen grimaced. He knew. And he didn’t like the way the bouncers had looked at her. “Anyways, the ditch outside that place soaked through my boots. I’m more worried about losing toes than assassins, at this point,” she went on. “So you’re just going to—going to stand there and look scary while I negotiate with this gentleman. If they have a kitchen cupboard we can stay in, we’re staying.”
She flashed the bartender her most I’m-charming-and-come-from-money smile. A torrent of Orlesian followed. If someone had told Cullen last week that he’d regret declining all of Vivienne’s suggestively-worded invitations to “teach him the basics,” he’d have laughed in their face. But the conversation flowed around them, and when the Inquisitor gestured over her shoulder at him and the bartender laughed, he could do nothing but glare down his nose at them both. “Tell me you have at least six silvers on you,” she muttered, at last.
“I have seven.”
She slumped in a posture of exaggerated relief, and the bartender laughed, again. His payment in hand, he reached under the counter, and fished out two keys, handing them off to Evelyn with a wink. In spite of his misgivings about the place, the buzzing of his combined worry and irritation, he felt his posture relax, slightly. It was about to be over, for a few hours, at least. He would stay awake and armed until last call, he decided, which would at least grant him a few hours of sleep. “Ten silvers for two rooms is highway robbery,” he groused, as the Inquisitor led him through a curtained door and down a hallway so narrow he could have touched both walls without fully extending his arms.
“Ah,” she said, looking uncharacteristically abashed for a moment as she paused in front of a door, number eight. She was suddenly very interested in fitting one of the keys into the lock. “Ten silvers for one room, I’m afraid. Second key’s a spare.”
Cullen stared at her. “You’re joking.”
She ignored him, jiggling the key experimentally until it turned. She swung the door open. For a long, stunned moment, he stood in the hallway. He felt rather than saw the Inquisitor light a candle with a flare of her magic. Could he simply stand in the hallway all night? He had a feeling that other guests would perceive this behavior as nosy. With a sigh, he followed her inside, shutting the door behind him.
It could be worse, he thought. The preposterously overpriced room, while nondescript and shabby, looked clean. The stain on the threadbare rug looked more like wine than anybody’s bodily fluids. The Inquisitor was unlikely to contract head lice or anything else from sleeping in the bed. He leaned against the door and sighed, watching her as she twisted her hands together. Her anxiety made her look younger. And it was difficult, when she had that uncertain, wavering look on her face, to be as annoyed with her as he’d like. He shut his eyes, watching white dots crawl behind them. He was tired, he realized, suddenly. He wanted nothing more than to take his armor off. It would have to wait.
“Your gloves hide the Anchor,” he said, levelly. “I very much doubt that word will travel. You should take off your wet boots, at least.”
For some reason, she bristled. “Turn around,” she snapped. Wordlessly, he complied. He heard rustling fabric and the clinking of metal. A soft green glow in his peripheral vision—she must have taken off her gloves. Finally, the sound of the linens being thrown back on the bed. “You can look.”
He did. He saw the Inquisitor in bed, the covers bunched high under her arms. He saw the Inquisitor in bed, the covers bunched high under her arms, because she was wearing a linen undershirt and—if the heap of clothes in the chair was anything to go by—nothing else. Cullen’s stomach dropped into his boots. She had that damnably vulnerable, uncertain look on her face, again. The one that made him want to do anything she asked.
“I’m going to roll over,” she said, when the silence between them had stretched to breaking point. “And you’re going to take off your armor and get into bed. And we’re both going to fall asleep and never speak of this again.”
Cullen wasn’t sure about any of that, although his hands strayed reluctantly to the ties of his surcoat as she turned her back pointedly to him, flipping the loose sheet of her ash-colored hair over a shoulder hunched almost up to her ear. Except never speaking of this again. That, he thought he could do.