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She had known that a relationship with Josephine would not be easy. Their families. The expectations placed on them by their stations. Their temperaments, which were clearly not so incompatible as they had seemed, at first blush. Cassandra’s work for the Inquisition, which took her away from Skyhold for weeks, months at a time. Josephine’s general disdain for tea, and her insistence on taking her coffee in the Tevinter style, brewed very strong, in tiny cups—vile traps, from which the unwary might sip a mouthful of bitter grounds.
But Cassandra had never anticipated such—such an insurmountable challenge. Such a deep and cutting betrayal.
"I tried to read them, my love," Josephine said, her bare feet tucked under her, head resting on Cassandra’s shoulder. "I did. It is so rare to see the Court excited for something, and they had never read anything like this Serah Tethras’s books. ‘Hard in Hightown’! You know how they like to pretend at being jaded, and what jokes they tell about Free Marchers. But—Varric's books are dreadful."
"Dreadful," Cassandra repeated. The fire was blazing against the winter chill. The blankets were piled high on their bed. Josephine herself was warm as a brazier, as though she'd brought the Antivan sun with her to the rear end of Ferelden. There was no escape.
"Varric knows nothing about boats," Josephine said patiently. "He does not even try to describe them, at first. Perhaps he went down to the docks—I have been to Kirkwall, they are as he wrote them. Perhaps he even looked at a few ships. But I don’t think he knows what anything is called beyond the mast and the poop deck, and I’m not certain he needed to mention the poop deck as much as he did."
And then she launched into a critique: the Captain Belladonna, as a Raider and a smuggler, would most likely be sailing an Antivan-made scuna, light and fast, easy to hide from the authorities, in their deep-chested (and much inferior) Orlesian galions, which could not navigate so close to the coast. It would not have been a big boat. And surely, Varric could have asked anyone and found out that the 'roundish wooden part’ was a prow.
Josephine was a merchant prince, Cassandra reminded herself, forcefully. Or she would be, once she inherited her family’s businesses. She had been reared around tall ships. She had so very many interesting scars on her hands, from summers spent in the family shipyards, learning the craft.
"He has another serial," Cassandra cut in, once Josephine paused for a breath. "'They’re, ah… romances. Trivial, smutty works."
"Are there a great number of torrid embraces?" Josephine asked.
"I am given to believe there are," Cassandra replied.
"Virtuously sheathed swords? Heaving breastplates."
The uninitiated might have heard nothing but innocence in Josephine’s tone. Cassandra, who knew her inside and out, and inside, and further inside, knew full well when she was being teased. But she had no gift for slyness or innuendo, and so she pressed her lips to the backs of Josephine’s once-mangled knuckles.
"I could find you a copy," Cassandra said. The pristine first editions in the chest at the foot of her bed, perhaps, which did not fall open to the torrid embraces when dropped. Only the best, for Josephine. "They might be more to your taste."
"I cannot imagine," Josephine said, undoing the top button of Cassandra’s shirt, "that they would be to yours. You should tell me all about them."