Savala waited quietly in the dim hallway outside Josephine's quarters, arms wrapped about herself as she leaned against the wall. Despite the display of confidence she'd given Cullen, every minute that crept by diminished it. She'd faced darkspawn, rebel mages, a dragon, and demons in the fade, but having to face her father seemed more daunting by far. She sorted through what various reasons could exist for something so illogical, and kept coming back to the fact that what would inevitably end in a conflict of wills would be something that would hurt him. She loved her father dearly, and admired him, and felt the same for the rest of her family. Her mother, her older sisters. She had told Cullen her father's purpose would be capitalization, and while that was true and expected, the method Bann Trevelyan would undoubtedly endeavor to deploy was one with which she could not comply.
Leliena had been named Divine almost the moment Corypheus had fallen, a decision that had likely been made long before that battle. One of her first dictates had been to abolish the Circle of Magi, which meant that mages now governed themselves. Savala was well aware of her father's old disappointment when it had become clear that she possessed the talent of a mage, and he had been forced to sacrifice what would be his last child to the Ostwick Circle. The fact that he had had only daughters likely only deepened this discouragement. Now, however ...
A door at the end of the hall opened, and quietly admitted Josephine, temporarily interrupting her thought process. With a glance, however, Savala saw her own concerns reflected on her friend's face.
"My lady," Josephine said as she joined Savala. Gone was the usual vigor and flush in her face that accompanied the activity of nobles at court. She touched Savala's arm lightly. "What can I do for you?"
Savala plucked tiredly at the gray uniform that had been her wardrobe at the Inquisition court since its advent. Well tailored and trimmed with gold, it was nonetheless not the style she wished to present to her father this night. "It sounds rather silly," she said, feeling a bit of warmth in her cheeks that made her feel more like a little girl than the most powerful woman in the world. "But something more..."
"Eloquent?" Josephine finished, flashing her a smile that was brilliant in her dark face. She opened her door and swept an arm through the opening, inviting her inside.
Savala escaped into Josie's quarters, which were warm and lit with a score of candles. An Antivan rug, purple and gold, adorned the floor, and Savala allowed herself to be ensconced in an overlarge, gilded chair opposite a mirror. The table before it was bedecked with bottles of all shapes and sizes, tiny boxes with metal clasps, ceramic jars.
"I have just the thing, my love," Josephine said in her lilting voice, crossing the room while Savala watched her in the mirror. The other woman disappeared behind an enormous black and gold screen, casting a shadow of movement on the wall. A moment later, a slightly muffled question followed. "How exacting would you care to be?"
Savala let out her breath in a snort of laughter. In the mirror, Josephine's dark head appeared from behind the screen, and answered her laughter with a conspiratorial smile. "Exacting enough that your father grows so weary of waiting that he retires once more to Ostwick?"
Resting her elbows on the table, Savala dropped her face into her hands. "You are quite good at what you do, Josie," she said in a tone that was part laughter, and part despair. Her friend did not answer immediately, but a moment later, Savala felt a hand on her back. She looked up and met Josephine's eyes in the mirror. The other woman's face reflected an expression of sympathy. She lifted the hand from Savala's back and gently stroked the Inquisitor's auburn hair.
"He will ask you to do your duty for your family," she said, less of a statement than a consolation.
"Who is it?" Savala asked. "Would he have me doomed to a life of celibacy as the Princess of Starkhaven?"
Josephine dropped her hand from her hair, and draped a garment of pale blue and gold across the back of the chair. "The Teryn of Ostwick, only," she said softly at first, then attempted to affect her usual cheerful tone. "Your family would be greatly elevated. Perhaps even second or third in the state." She sighed heavily and leaned against the table to face her, hands clasped before her.
Savala continued to stare straight ahead, watching candles flicker in the mirror. "I can't," she whispered.
"Because you love Cullen." It was not a question. Josephine missed nothing in the undercurrents of the people's lives that revolved around her own, and little in those that didn't, had she the mind not to. Her friend had likely been the first, even before shrewd, too-well informed Leiliana, to see what had begun to stir between the Inquisitor and the Commander of her armies, long months before.
Savala didn't reply,because it wasn't necessary. Josephine spoke again after a moment. "There are a hundred ways he could be elevated. His family given land, title, but ..."
"... he would never take it. Not even for me." Savala finished. "He is much too proud."
Josephine let out a sigh. "Yes. I know." She hung her head for a moment. When she looked up, her expression of sympathy had hardened into that familiar, noble determination. "Then you will just tell your father thank you, and no." She spun the dress from the chair and flared it out before her. "And you will look beautiful doing it."
…
Blackwall pulled at the neck of the formal red and blue attire that Josephine had insisted be reclaimed from his discard pile for the impromptu gathering. He felt just as awkward in the outfit now as he'd felt at the masquerade in Halamshiral. It was stiff, and hot, which equably described his own feelings. He found himself wishing that Varric hadn't returned to Kirkwall following the battle. The dwarf was magical with irreverent commentary, especially regarding nobility and its self-righteous pomp.
He sighed and leaned a shoulder into the brick hearth. The omnipresent Orlesian ladies and ought-to-be-ladies in their ridiculous, nothing-to-the-imagination pants and jeweled masks bothered him immensely. How could anyone breathe in those frilled collars, or in any of it? Or see, for that matter. He'd worn helmets in battle that he imagined one could see out of better than those hawk-nosed contraptions.
Battle, he thought. Darkspawn, blood and mud and the possibility of death. Yes. Much more preferable than this.
He was here for her, and only her. He would have done absolutely anything for her, which he imagined was a sentiment shared by everyone that had ever basked in her shadow. And it was a long one.
He scanned the room for her, and felt a familiar sensation that was part anger and part hurt that he had to seek her out now, when there had been a time that she had come to him. He wondered every day if he'd just been honest with her from the start, if he'd have her now. Her relationship with Cullen was probably spoken about in Skyhold more often than Corypheus, or any of the other insignificant **** like saving the world that had taken place before that love story had become common knowledge. It galled him to the core, and he spent most of his time in the barn, with the conveniently silent horses.
Savala was no where to be seen, fashionably late to her own party. He smirked to himself, and imagined she was probably as thrilled about the attention as he was to be privy to its circumstance. One of the things that he favored most in her was her seeming inability to recognize that she was looked to as perhaps short only of a goddess herself. She was always the first to disappear from these events, and the last to arrive. But it just made her more of a mystery, more ethereal, and the people were ever more fascinated. He doubted she realized that either.
His eyes found the man of the hour, Ser Bann Trevelyan, standing rather presumptuously, Blackwall thought, beside the imposing throne of the Inquisitor. Savala's father looked nothing if not inordinately pleased with himself, as though he'd brought this all about on his own with a night between silk sheets all those years ago. Blackwall didn't see much of a resemblance between them, but the woman at his side had Savala's cheekbones, and the same impossibly long eyelashes. He hadn't caught whether it was her mother, or her oldest sister, but if it was the former, she had aged remarkably well.
A serving man passed by, and Blackwall almost felled the man with a hand to his sleeve. He took not one, but two mugs of beer, earning himself a beetled brow from the servant. He tipped both mugs at the man in thanks, who snorted and went about his work. Blackwall drained half the first mug in one sip, and peered about the hall for the man he perhaps liked least in the world.
Ser Cullen Rutherford was not to be found. It surprised Blackwall, as he couldn't imagine how the commander could fail to enjoy his magnetism. Blackwall himself had absconded to the lower levels at Halamshiral partly to avoid the obnoxious gathering, and partly because it made his blood boil to see how Cullen attracted women like flies to ****. The only credit Blackwall could give him was that he never seemed to return the attention. If he had, Blackwall might have felt like knocking his perfect teeth down his throat. He had her. No man could want more than that.
It wasn't just that Savala had chosen Cullen over him that stemmed his dislike of the man. The commander had never forgiven Blackwall's deception , and it seemed to Blackwall that when he deigned to speak to him at all, it was always with thinly veiled scorn. Savala, on the other hand … he knew he had hurt her, and it would haunt him until the day he died, but she had moved mountains to offer him absolution, and she had wanted him by her side in every battle they'd faced since the day, in this very room, she'd ordered his chains removed. He knew in his heart, that despite what he'd done, she respected him. And Cullen despised him. He had wondered if the commander was jealous, of all the time he'd been by Savala's side, fighting the real battles, while Cullen himself endured the sidelines of command. But how the hell could a man that shared her bed be jealous of him?
He drained his first cup, and shoved it unceremoniously onto the mantle of the hearth. The din of the room was a cacophony of clinking glass, laughter, indistinguishable talk, lute music, and, where he stood, the faint crackling of burning wood. It thankfully masked the ubiquitous aroma of Orlesian perfume, which he hated. It made him miss the field.
He was remembering the nights camping under the stars in the Hinterlands, where the war had been masked by thousands of stars and the whispering of leaves and water, when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned, and found Josephine, resplendent as always. She smiled, but not her usual smile, as it fell away almost immediately.
“Ser Blackwall,” she said in a low voice meant only for him. “The Lady Inquisitor asks for you.”
He simply stared at her for a moment, mug lifted halfway to his lips, completely unprepared for that statement. Then Josephine tilted her head subtly toward the door that led to the upper balcony. “If you will?” Josephine's elegant fingers plucked the mug from his fingers, and set it with exaggerated care on the mantle, while regarding him with wide, expectant eyes.
Blackwall snapped to, and felt a stab of worry for Savala that belayed any questions for Josephine, and he disengaged himself from the wall and made for the door. It stood partially ajar, and he slipped through it, leaving it as he had found it. Sconces were lit along the curving staircase, and he took them two two at a time, reaching the balcony that looked down over the main hall, on the far side of the room from the Inquisitor's throne.
He rounded the corner onto the ledge, and froze as though he'd struck an invisible wall. Savala stood there, just inside a stone edifice that masked her from the court room below. He knew his mouth was open, but he couldn't shut it, or speak. The Inquisitor had been transformed. He had fought beside her as she was covered in the black blood of darkspawn, struggling through fields of mud, soaked to the skin. He'd seen her wield a sword of light, more resplendent in blood red armor than he thought possible. But he had never seen this woman.
She wore a pale blue dress, limned in gold, that turned her exotic gray eyes to blue ice, all the more striking framed by those long black eyelashes. Her auburn hair was braided in two coils at the nape of her neck, and she wore around her head a single narrow gold ribbon, the ends of which lay across her shoulders at her breast, adorned at the bottom with two pins – tiny reproductions of the symbol of the Inquisition cast in gold. She wore no jewelry, but she made the Orlesian Empress look like a pauper.
“Damnit Blackwall,” she said, and he realized as he looked at her face again, that she looked profoundly unhappy. “ I feel absolutely ridiculous.”
He couldn't help a short bark of laughter. “Savala...” he said. “You are Andraste come to earth.”
She frowned rather severely. “I don't think this was as good of an idea as I had thought. I'm one minute from going downstairs in full body armor.”
“Why in the Maker's name? You'll shut them all up. Why not perform a miracle when the opportunity arises?”
At that, Savala laughed, hiding her face behind her hand for a moment. Her amusement passed quickly, however, and when she looked up at him, there was something else in her eyes.
“Walk down with me,” she pleaded. 'I don't want to do this alone.”
Blackwall felt his brow furrow, and he looked about unnecessarily for Cullen, who very well should have been at her side if she felt such trepidation. Then it hit him, for he was sharper than the commander gave him credit for. It wasn't a secret why Savala's father was here. She was a free mage, the Inquisitor, the savior of Thedas, with a castle, the loyalty of nations, and an army as a dowry. She was perhaps the most valuable commodity in the realm, and she was, technically, at her father's disposal. And she was a noble, which Cullen was not. So here, when it came for it, the bastard had no intention of fighting for her. Or even walking into battle with her.
When he looked back to Savala, her intelligent face revealed that she had likely followed his thought process, but the steel in her eyes said she had no wish to discuss it. So Blackwall offered her his arm in silence.
....to be continued.
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