faderift | open | neither snow nor rain

Entry tags:

open | neither snow nor rain

WHO: Nari, Lexie, you~
WHAT: Guardian catch-all for some ladies. (Well, one Lady and one elf.)
WHEN: The Present!
WHERE: Kirkwall
NOTES: prompts I have promised people will be appearing below as I get to them!

Nari

I.

With the sleet keeping everything near-constantly coated with ice, Guardian is hardly the right month to be jaunting about between the Gallows towers and the towers that hold the massive machinery designed to raise and lower Kirkwall's immense chain net. The massive machinery that hasn't been used in two decades, ever since Viscount Threnhold had used it to strangle Orlesian trade and the Divine had ordered the city's Templars to 'convince' him to lower it. Threnhold's successors had been loathe to use it with such a tangle in the recent past, and so its mechanism is full of two decades of largely untended metal shifting, weathering, rusting in places.

The winter seas are rough enough that an assault by sea isn't likely, but the thin dark Dalish woman had shrugged and said that the Archon's Palace raising into the sky above Minrathous hadn't been all that likely either, and so here she is, on her way to the Chain tower, a pack of tools slung over her back. A pack that has been repaired several times, and by the look of it is about to need one more: something heavy looking is inching its way out of the back of it with every step she takes. Won't be long before that's lost. Hope it's not important.

II.

What Guardian is the right month for is being here near the hearth in the Hanged Man's taproom with a hot mug of mulled wine and a mallet, tapping chairs back together and listening with quiet amusement to a harper on one side and two tipsy men one-upping each other outrageously in order to try to take the same woman home on the other.

The important thing, really, is that the weather is outside, but the entertainment isn't unwelcome.

“Are you listening to this?” she asks, looking up briefly with a crooked grin spreading across her face, “The taller one has gone from fisherman to ship's captain in the space of five minutes.”

[ or something else! ]

Alexandrie

Winter here has not brought the lovely romantic fluffy pristine snow she'd dreamed of. It's desperately horrible in Kirkwall, and what work she can do from home she does from home with great relief. Unfortunately there are still meetings to be had, new correspondence to discuss, and every so often new books, scraps, and sheafs of paper arrive for the Inquisition that are in need of translation. All these things are in the Gallows, and so, begrudgingly, is Alexandrie.

She can be found now, looking far less disgruntled than she actually is, sitting at a table in the library with a letter in one hand—at which she is frowning with extreme delicacy—and a painted porcelain cup of tea in the other, her maid doing a spot of embroidery close enough at hand to refresh it when that becomes necessary.

“Ah!” she exclaims quietly, her glance warm and pleased over her painstakingly painted smile, “C'est parfait. Have you a moment to spare?”

[ ...or something else! ]

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A thin smile. "And my mere words are turning him into a wicked thing - is that it? Note, dearest Lexie, that he's living under your roof."

"You might have called me such and meant it, once." To her chagrin, these words require an even softer volume for her tone to remain even. She had thought, perhaps, somewhere, under all of it... but no. No.

"But that is the coin I traded away, when I learned to live by lie. Will you teach him to spend so?"

"Again I ask," By says, "what your imagination tells you is happening." A languid shrug, just the right degree of offended, just the right degree of unconcerned. "I presume you've decided we're screwing, since I doubt you'd get yourself worked up quite this much just for the sake of a burgeoning friendship. But believe me, Lexie, even my wicked cock cannot introduce evil entire into the boy's heart."

"I have little need for imagination. Whether it speaks well of him or not, Colin still trusts me. And he has not yet learned to dissemble."

Her eyebrows twitch upwards slightly on 'yet'.

A dry, taut smile. "It feels like you're trying - poorly - to get me to admit to some wrongdoing by pretending to know more than you do," he says. "Colin trusts me. What has he trusted you with?"

"Uncouth of you, Byerly," Alexandrie sighs. "I do not comment on the quality of your various and sundry attempts to bait and distract me."

Moreover they are hardly necessary. The very fact of his presence is enough to set her wrongfooted every time, cause her to spin awkward webs of truth and falsehood together; the first out of hope that somehow she could prove she had changed. Had become something different than she had been. The second out of the fear that he had changed as well. That always, always, they would be unrecognizable to each other.

And then, in hope, the steps to her strange awkward dance would begin again.

Byerly, it seemed always, had no such difficulty. But then, he had had years to leave her behind while she froze herself in time. Years in which to settle into the belief that she had been precisely the woman she had wished everyone to think her. And so to him, she was. To then learn what he had learned, and... what poor attempts she made seemed only fumbles. Attempts to again play him for a fool.

"The covert arts. They snip kindness, and trust, and—" the slightest pause. Half a breath. Natural, even. "Love from their students like roses deemed weeds. Which they are, in such a garden." Or at least she had been so clipped in her shaping, and a Bardmaster's is the only hand she knows. Alexandrie shakes her head slightly. "Not him. He is good. So much better than I. I will not have it."

What I want to know, damn you, is if he's told you who I work for. Never mind these abstractions of goodness and souls: he needs to know if his identity has been passed along to the paramour of a Vint. To this Orlesian. He hopes Colin wouldn't be so incautious, but the boy is inexperienced. And Lexie has such a way of getting you to let your guard down. Not a concern before - but now that her allegiance has been made official...

He swears, if this whole endeavor has compromised him, he's going to have words with Yseult. And he's going to be the recipient of words from the Spymaster. The memory of the blistering letter he'd received after telling him that Yseult had found him out still makes him cringe internally.

Well. "The boy is going to war," By says plainly. "And you're coming to his blacksmith, asking him to deny the soldier a sword. I assure you, my dear, if he dies, you will not find yourself gratified by this particular strain of melodrama, if that's what you're after."

She hadn't needed Colin to tell her who he worked for. Or Yseult. Or the Scoutmaster.

Alexandrie had time, with her face pressed hard into the pillow she'd clutched after the two men had left, to think about what it was she'd heard. About the particular things he had learned in the intervening years, so many of them the same as she had been taught by Emile. He had left Orlais. She had not been able to help but keep an ear to the ground, and there had been only silence that she had hated and relished in equal measure. And so, he had not learned for the Game. Had not learned to return to have his vengeance on her, as she had done for Rolant. He had come from Denerim, had been in Ferelden. What need for such skills, save in the service of either criminal or Crown? The latter was much more likely, for all that he had always played the seedy insouciant. And such servants were not released. Even if they were, he had ever been too honorable to make such a severance.

And the Inquisition was a powerful and unpredictable force for change. Of course Queen Anora would want a finger on its pulse.

"Healers go to war just as well, and just as needed!" she hisses lowly, mindful of the way stone might carry sound, "If the Scoutmaster finally yanks the leash she fastened him with and has given you the whistle," she gestures, eyes flashing, "then lie. Tell her you cannot, that he is unsuitable for it. That he will have to pay his debt some other way. It will hardly be the first time you have spun for her." The frustrated anger fades, her voice changing to the even careful tone that marks someone armed with more than knowledge and unsure as to whether or not it will be needed. "Will it."

"I've no dealings with the Scoutmaster." Not a lie, truly. No doubt the Scoutmaster knows of him, but all his dealing are with the lithe spy who'd cornered him. So: not a lie.

But Maker, he needs to lie. He needs to throw her off the scent. She's looking at him so knowingly, as though she's quite certain of some dire truth. And he cannot permit her to leave this room still believing it of him. Not when she'll pour it into an enemy's ears.

"My dear," he says, sighing, "I think you've gotten the wrong idea. The boy has been recruited for something. I'm a well traveled man. I have been asked to arm him with information and certain...outlooks. Don't let your imagination carry you away."

It's not as if she'd ever deserved his trust.

"Have you. And with no dealings with the Scoutmaster, who is it who asked you to arm her man."

"The man." Byerly's shrug is perfectly natural. "It seems the child observed my skill for dissembling - to say nothing of my keen eye - when we encountered each other after Ghislain."

Then he cultivates a sparkle in his eye, an amused glimmer. "How fascinating this is. Do you want me to be a spy, Lexie?"

"Her man," she says again. "I have been waiting for months for her to tug the line she tied to him. And you? If I did, you would not be one." You have never been what I wanted you to be.

"Do you consider me so contrary?"

His manner turns playful, almost flirtatious. She is afraid of him. She's afraid of succumbing to him. It is a strange thing - but she fears that, and no doubt she fears it more now, when she's committed to her Vint. So: best to scare her. To make her shut away the thoughts of him.

"It is a moderately erotic image, I must say. Me, wrapped up in intrigue and danger. Gives a bit of a thrill - if one is a voyeuristic sort."

"Ah, and you know well I am," she replies, speaking her own tongue again, as it is where her low purr is most practiced. She eyes him through slightly lowered lashes, her smile sensuous, and full of promise, and entirely crafted. Trousers allow her what skirts would not; the freedom to rather gracefully step to settle herself astride him where he sits, to lean forward so that their noses nearly touch while she settles her hands at his shoulders to give her the support she needs to cinch herself tighter against him. And the familiarity of it aches dully, but she gently sets it aside.

She had been. Afraid. Agonizingly and entirely terrified. But now? No. There would be no trembling hands, no sudden too-fervent kisses, no brilliant snap of tension, no moment of finally being in the same place at the same time without falsehoods wound around them as surely as the bedsheets. What had she to fear? He no longer wished her, and she knew so, and thus it would again be only a game.

And Alexandrie has always only feared truth.

She leans back, then, and lifts a hand to tuck the very ends of the wing of his hair behind his ear as she once had with a sort of wistful innocence. It is not quite long enough yet, though, and none of it will stay. "You would take me and leave me, I think." She smiles, little and sad and knowing. "But you would not do it for the fear of loving me. You would do it to distract me. And so I should be ripped to pieces, and you should feel nothing, and then we should be even."

She tugs at his hair gently and then makes to rise.

"We are even already."

"My dear Alexandrie."

He can adapt. He can see that the flirtation was ineffective. So at once he places his hand on her chest, warding her off, smile twisted in discomfort. "My dearest girl, this sort of behavior is normally quite charming. But you are engaged now, are you not?"

It's almost giddy, the horrible release of confirmation. Alexandrie lets him deter her, uses the light force of his hand to aid her up and back.

"How Fereldan of you," she observes, still wearing her odd little look. "Perhaps someday the Orlesian wife of an Altus will be of interest enough to the Queen that you shall overcome your noble scruples and we may continue."

"The Queen?" He shakes his head, amused confusion rolling off him. Had Colin told her? Or is he so transparent? He is a fool and a jester - a worthless cast-off, undesirable and undesired. Hadn't she seen that more than most, in his memories? There has never been any value to him. So why is she so dead-set on deciding that he's what his Queen has made him?

"Do you fancy she'll be deciding that infidelity is something permitted?"

Edited 2019-02-19 01:51 (UTC)

"Taking lovers has always been a matter of course," Alexandrie replies dismissively, "Make inquiry to your clever cousin if you have forgotten."

Then, her hands holding her elbows, she switches horses mid-ride again near as quickly as he has been. "Did you trust me, once?" Is the quiet inquiry.

He's quiet a moment. The answer, of course, is yes, and she's a fool if she thinks otherwise. She saw how besotted he was with her, back then. The penniless miserable unwanted fool, struggling to make his way, suddenly wrapped up in her golden life. He'd have done anything for her. She was like a font of all the joy he'd lost - even wounded, even disgraced, she was like Andraste to him. His trust had been as absolute as his love. He had, after all, been painfully, laughably naive back then.

He isn't now. It serves him well as a spy. Perhaps, he thinks, cruelly, it's a very good thing she's so close to Colin; she'll drive the kindness out of him yet. Unfair.

"The question, Lexie," he responds, watching the whiskey in his glass as it catches the light, "is whether I can trust you now. What do you think the answer to that question is?"

She is more worth trusting now than she was then. Now she has no scheme for him, not even one being put off and shoved to the back of her mind as she slowly stopped wanting it. Had stopped caring what her position at court was, who smiled, who frowned, who whispered, what they said of her. She had music, and stars, and a young man with glorious eyes who would do anything to make her laugh. Who would let her stick her feet in the pockets of his coat when they got cold from the dew soaking through the thin silk of her slippers.

He had done nothing, then. Nothing but smile at her sleepily and reach to gather her and make a contented noise when she'd wriggled her way over to seam herself to his side that had made her feel warm and soft and safe. And then frozen and terrified in equal measure at her own failure to guard herself again. It had been stark and overwhelming and consuming, and she had slipped free, and she had slipped away, and she had destroyed him.

But before that, she had loved him.

And she loves him now.

And she is still afraid.

"No."

He shrugs at her in response, the gesture taut and sharp. "Then why do you act as though I do? Or should?"

A hand run through his hair dislodges the lock she'd fiddled with earlier. It falls back into his eyes. His other hand curves around his glass, tilting it to swirl the whiskey around - an absent gesture, a nervous tic. But he does give little away. All of these gestures could be those of a frustrated ex-lover, just as easily as they could be those of a suspicious spy.

"You've already ripped everything private away from me, so now you want to invent more secrets to uncover. Is that it?"

She's lost her steam, now. And the thread of the fearful anger that had brought her barging in. And the lofty manic confidence that had come with being so sure that she could make herself stop caring, knowing it was only she who did.

"No." It is a defeated and forlorn sounding thing.

"No?" He holds the whiskey, now, like it's evidence, like he's leading a landsmeet and this is what he uses to prove his opponent's wickedness. "Then what? What is it you desire from me, Mademoiselle?"

The question is like a blade, and Alexandrie flinches away from both it and the answer that still rings in her chest. She wishes she'd taken him up on the drink. She wishes she hadn't heard the two of them talking at all. That he'd never come to Kirkwall, that she'd never left Orlais, that she could take time in her hands like a Dwarven clock and turn the gears backwards and rip out every stitch she'd ever sewn.

"Protect him, then." It grates out of her, wanting to be other words. Ones she doesn't deserve to say. It's a useless ask; she knows well enough he will. Byerly can't help it, that thread is woven into him hard and tight. "If you must be so placed. If I am to be rendered unable to."

"Rendered unable." The phrase is exquisitely dry.

Perhaps he is being unkind to Lexie, in truth; perhaps she doesn't deserve this. She has not, after all, done anything particularly wicked since the time when he wasn't furious with her. She's just made a choice. And this impulse, to preserve Colin's innocence, isn't a wicked one, Maker knows. And yet he finds himself with the unkindest thoughts in his heart.

"Why not become one yourself? A spy." His smile is flat. "If you're so distressed about being rendered unable to help."

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