Chapter Text
“I still don’t understand why Hawke married him in the first place.” Isabela rolls her neck, her hair falling loose over her shoulders beneath the salt-grimed silk of her kerchief. A picture image, the very dream of what a man or woman might hope to find when they knocked through the doors of the Hanged Man.
“Sure you do,” says Varric, and she flicks a hand, sets her rings to jingling.
“Oh, I get the appeal. You know I read The Maker’s Hands until it fell apart in my hands—liked it better than A Member of the Faith myself—the appeal of the shining Brother’s more than clear. And he’s such a lovely specimen. The hands alone, deft with a bow, raised in prayer. I could think of something different to do with each knuckle.”
“At once?”
“Why not?”
“You put us all to shame.”
And she does. Makes a magnificent picture by firelight, candlelight. Upstages him, really. But she hasn’t taken the story out of his hands, not yet, even if the whole Hanged Man has its eyes on her. That helps more than it hurts. Where there are watching eyes, there are listening ears.
“The trick is not to have any,” she says. “Which is what I’m saying. There are better ways to get your knees sore than kneeling at the altar. And nobody ever needed to tell Hawke that.”
It’s only them tonight, in the din and splash and muffled fist-thump they call home. They are not gathered, for Hawke is not here. Hawke, at home in Hightown, now, locked in and fuming. Varric feels her absence like the first pinprick pain of a stab wound, is waiting to see how far it goes, how deep she pushes.
He lays down his cards. This hand isn’t getting him anywhere.
“That’s not it,” he says. “More than anything, our Hawke likes winning. But she should never have let Choirboy set the terms of the game.”
A thousand things had gone wrong, in that a thousand things had gone right.
Marian Hawke saw the sun shining off Sebastian Vael’s armor, the way his arrow arced clean through the air, and he’d been hers. Simple as that. Oh, she’d had to kill a handful of mercenaries to get back to him, but she’d done it. For the light, the clean lines, the piercing blue eyes. Varric’s jokes about handsome princes notwithstanding—that had always been more Bethany’s line of dreaming.
For Marian’s part, she’d never needed a prince, not when she could cut a man’s throat before she was twelve, not when she and Carver had grown up with their blades unsheathed back to back. Standing between Bethany and danger. Standing on the lip of the hungry world.
She’s loved that all her life—not quite the fight, per se, but the fighting back, the fighting for, the reasons. Having a life worth spilling blood over. Carver, the last honorable fighter in the Hawke line, had fallen and she couldn’t look back, had given that grief to Bethany and their mother for safekeeping. She had them to keep, first. And a world to—if not to claim, then to fight for, to slice through, to make hers.
Hers, Kirkwall, peopled with her and hers: Isabela, salt in her hair, Varric and the coin-slide of a free drink at the Hanged Man, Merrill’s questions and Fenris’s qualms and Anders pushing the light back under his skin just long enough to make a soft joke and set a plate of milk out for the cats. They’d come to her, in the end. All of them. And they stayed.
Sebastian Vael, prince of Starkhaven and brother of the faith, was never something she had dreamed of. Yet here he was: a new challenge, a new story, and the full lines of his mouth? Delicious. The Chantry was unexplored ground, not that Grand Cleric Elthina was happy to have her there like this, tracking grit and mud in on the soles of her boots. But new is new, and it smelled of candles and incense in a way that rang familiar. That called her, not home but sideways. If the Circle hadn’t smelled so Maker-taken cold it might have smelled a bit like that. If the Gallows hadn’t seemed like the stones were hollow, like the building itself had been made Tranquil. Cut off from Kirkwall life indeed.
But Bethany wrote that she was happy there, hadn’t she, so there was no reason to go back. If the Chantry got her thinking of the Gallows that could only be good for Bethany, who had always found it consoling to bow her head and clasp her hands and listen to the Chantry’s particular three-chorded echoing songs. So Bethany could be happy in the cold rock, sure. Of course she could, Bethany who lit up everywhere she went, warmed every room. Marian could keep her horror to herself, dammed up in the pit of her stomach. No reason to linger in its halls. To seek more than what she found. Every time she left, she left wanting to bathe, either in hot-scalded bathing-water or in the salt filth of the harbor’s sea. One or the other, with nothing in the middle.
She hadn’t seen Bethany, but she took her cues here as best she could. Bit her tongue, for the benefit of the pretty prince, and didn’t spit in the Grand Cleric’s eye as much as her companions wanted her to. They’d been shocked by her mildness. Just shocked. They’d gone in expecting her to make a scene. Varric had felt denied.
But Vael’s eyes, wonderfully blue, had lit up for her, and that was a game won, the same game as always. He offered his bow to her, same victory. She’d raised her fingertip, in a darkened corner, to trace beneath the line of his lower lip, same victory lap. She’d been smiling. It had been fun.
Until he’d stepped back, and then it hadn’t.
But she’d seen the look. In those clear blue eyes, which had gone just a little muddy. In the deep hoods of his eyelids, the soft flick of his lashes. The promise of fallibility, same as the rest of them—just like her, with her blood up, her hands itching to unbuckle his myriad buckles, Andraste first.
So, there was the quest, revealing itself to her as they always did. She fixed Kirkwall’s problems. Had sworn her blades to that, as her companions had to her. Everyone was married to some higher purpose, even—especially—the ones that swore up and down they loved nothing more than themselves.
“Is that for me, dwarf?”
“My dear, it was for me. I only have to love one thing. I thought you said you loved six?”
Stood to reason, then. All her liars and thieves and bedfellows had principles under their skin; those that wore their principles on the outside had to pack their lies and their desires beneath.
There was a problem in Kirkwall, and she’d fix it. Bring what was dark to the light. Dark. Ruinous. Throbbing—
“All right, all right, Rivaini. Let’s not spend ourselves before we begin.”
“You underestimate me. You think I can’t keep going all night?”
So she’d gotten caught up.
People had said worse things, more unbelievable things to Marian Hawke than marry me, than Her Grace will accept you as a sister in faith. She’d grinned, laughed, pressed her toe to the toe of his boot. “Sure,” she’d said. “Sure, she will. Of course. Try her.”
She hadn’t counted on Sebastian, whose silver tongue had stayed as polished as his armor over the years, burnished by the Maker’s own Light. Hadn’t counted on his bargaining and his determination. On how good it must have felt, while she awaited for her own satisfactory on-to-the-next-thing ending, for him to win. This was a victory.
She’d gone to the altar still waiting for the joke to finish. Hadn’t realized until their hands were clasped—in prayer rather than passion, with Elthina chaperoning the joining in His good name—that it had been serious all along.
The words had spilled out of him as though he’d been possessed, and later he wondered if Andraste had felt the same. The overwhelming, rolling force that passed through him, heart working his tongue with no time at all to tell his brain along the way. But faith didn’t need thoughts, and there were pretexts for what he said. Marriage without sin, without sacrifice. Hawke, have we not sacrificed enough?
He had been prepared to—once he started hearing himself—to persuade her. But she hadn’t taken any. His savior, his commander, his honed force of a woman, as near a creature to Andraste as any living in this world. Had smiled at him. Had said—
Well, she’d said “Why not,” which would never make the gospels. And then, “I’m sure your Cleric Elthina could come up with some reasons, but I’ll leave those to her, hmm?” The teasing hum, flute-light. The shrug of her shoulders, narrow under the leather. For all the banked power, for all her heavy steps and the way every room she entered went quiet at the sound of them, Hawke was built small. Like her knives. “Come see me in the Hanged Man when you hear from her. No, better. The Rose. I’ll buy you a night. Call it a wedding gift.”
He’d watched her go, beneath the carving of the sun, a world unto herself. She’d said yes. And after he’d spoken to Elthina, who’d said yes—
Are you so surprised, he’d asked, that there’s faith in her? He’d told her all the while she’d come around. (Though he kept the name of Andraste out of his mouth for that afternoon. Prudence was a virtue, though her fierce face was newly alive in his heart.)
Hawke, not first, but best. The others would follow, those that had not already. Fenris’s branded fingers had lit candles here; the guardscaptain said a begrudging hello on Sundays. The rest would follow. Apostates and pirates or no.
The only way to lead was by example. Hawke knew that; he saw it in her uniquely.
She is the most righteous woman I have ever met, he had said, and she had saved a city from conversion by the qunari sword, and though she looked as though she gave consent at that selfsame swordpoint, Elthina had said yes.
And he had waited by the altar, and Hawke in her turn had come.
She had worn her armor, leather still rust-brown in places. Freshly stained from the day. The smear of madder red she wore as a warlike warning across the bridge of her nose was as bright as if she’d just painted it on, as though he was the enemy she was primed to go toe to toe with even as she stood opposite him with a smile on. She smelled of sweat and of the streets. Had she told him it was righteous he would have bent his head and let her grind his face into the cobblestones, trusting he would come up the better for it. She did no such thing. Only grinned that sharp sliding grin and tilted her head.
“I’ve rings by the dozens,” she’d said, careless and light, and she’d brought up a purse from her belt, hefty and odd-angled from within. Damp and dark, he hoped only with sweat. So they weren’t living a life bathed in holy water yet. He couldn’t count on that until Starkhaven was at peace. Until then, he had no righteousness but this: Hawke, full of cause, even holding a bag full of rings she’d pulled—he knew—off the fingers of corpses.
Elthina, thin-lipped, watched, as he put his hand over Hawke’s. His wife’s hand, now.
“I need no earthly possessions to affirm my devotion,” he said, and he swore by his faith that at that exact moment a sunbeam had come down through the window, blinding him for half a moment and affirming him. He had chosen well.
No better shield from temptation than this.
And so they are married.
“Present tense, now?”
“For now.”
“We can hope.”
“Be careful what you wish for, Rivaini.”
“Why? She wasn't.”