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WHO: John + Petrana
WHAT: secrets
WHEN: post abomination
WHERE: the gallows
NOTES: just discussion of secrets, nbd.

The work doesn't stop.

Whatever John wants in this moment has to be set aside. The uncertain grief of the news out of Nascere has lodged in his chest, exists as a hastily patched wound as he goes about his business. So he sleeps less, drinks a little more. The work goes on, and John cannot step back from it.

(He gave himself a single day. That is all.)

There is a small packet of papers in his hand, folded over neatly. John had them stacked at the edge of his desk, before he decided to ferry them to Flint's office himself. The annoyance of traversing all the way to Flint's office to find it empty registers dully, superseded by the heat of the day and the larger, more crushing matters on his mind. (Madi. The mage in the Gallows.) The packet is deposited on Matthias' desk before he begins making his way down.

"He's not in," is the greeting Petrana receives, though John has already moved to the side to allow her room to pass if she is so inclined. "And it seems Matthias is out as well. Not that I blame them, considering the temperature of those rooms."

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They have crossed paths only fleetingly, and from time to time, but nevertheless John Silver is sufficiently memorable (—and relevant, the more she and Flint bend their heads together) that it doesn't take her a moment to place him, his voice. His demeanor, which is not unique to anyone in the Gallows this week. In the heat and considering the number of stairs that she had traveled up to find no one but Silver, she permits herself a sigh.

“Well, it will keep,” she says, philosophically, and she does pass him by but only to deposit her own packet of notes (on Flint's desk, not Matthias's) before turning, her summer-weight skirts in one fist as she moves. “Would that my own office were any less oppressive.”

It is a strange moment to think of the jungle, of Flint's voice coming quietly out of the day.

She knows because I told her.

He does not look after the papers she had set on Flint's desk. Instead, he falls into step with her as they give up the venture, leave the office without further discussion of it's absent occupant. This is in some way unavoidable; there is only one way down.

"Maybe that's a cue for us to follow his example and seek cooler venues," John suggests. As if his preferred venue has not been closing himself off, somewhere his misery cannot be witnessed. "I don't think any of our colleagues would fault us, all things considered."

The abomination. (Nascere, fallen to ruin.)

(There are two ways down, but Petrana doesn't like to think about that.)

Us, he says, and she favors him with a slightly thoughtful look. John Silver doesn't strike her as a man who makes implicit invitations inadvertently; she might not presume the intent, with someone else, but she is aware of him and that awareness is particular. “Well, I cannot say that I've earned it so directly as some of them, recently,”

being what Dumas had termed fragile and useless, the abomination had seen her shut herself up in the quarters she shares with Julius, drinking red wine and listening to her crystal,

“but nor can I claim to have made a habit of idleness that anyone might object to. You speak as if you have something in mind.”

He could demur, easily, without either of them losing face for it. Or this might get interesting.

Us, deployed carefully. Perhaps even belatedly; this is something he should have done upon their return from the jungle. There had seemed an abundance of things requiring his attention then, and what did it matter if he waited a little while longer to become familiar with Petrana de Cedoux.

It would have been better had he approached this without the weight of the abomination on his shoulders. (Without the endless uncertainty of Madi, the sense that only one outcome is possible and he must steel himself against it.)

"I have what I believe is a fairly good bottle of wine, and a decision as to which garden I plan on hiding in to drink it."

So the bottle had likely been meant for Byerly. He can't miss what he doesn't know existed.

The brief quirk of her mouth—not quite a smile, but fleetingly warm, familiar—has a hint of knowing to it. She is not going to comment on cultivating the tower's occupants; she has long done the same, after all, if her efforts have in recent times become more focused. (Yseult is a cipher, still, but Thranduil is an obstacle to be managed and navigated at his best and after the abomination, Rutyer seems cut from similar cloth.)

“I am often counseled to spend more time apart from my desk than I do,” she allows. “It would be most unkind of me, even irresponsible, to permit you to do so alone.”

What's your game, Silver.

Suppose there isn't a game? (Except that there is. There always is, to some extent.)

Her indulgence secured, it's only a matter of fetching the bottle and a pair of cups on their way down. The heat has driven most out of the Diplomacy office, even the Skull. It is not until they're seated in the shade, John working the cork free, that the conversation turns from pleasantries to something more substantial.

"I believe we have some shared interests," John begins, a statement that ranges from his partnership with Flint to the business in Nevarra to magic, whether she is aware of it or not. "And I've been...remiss, I suppose, not to speak with you sooner."

Offering her the first cup, letting the silence hang momentarily. It is easy to think it is solely the business with the stranger in the Gallows and what had been wrought there. But he cannot imagine she has not yet heard one whisper or another, waits a moment to see what she volunteers.

As easy as it would be to assume those few things—she doesn't. But nor is she inclined to make it easy for him, fishing for first moves; arguably a testament to the impression of him she has thus far that she's disinclined to, would prefer to see where he wishes to take this conversation he's prompted her into.

It puts her in mind of cats, circling. Perhaps they will be lucky or wise enough not to strike one another.

Instead: “I must own some responsibility for a failing of approachability,” is what she settles on, self-deprecating, smiling. “I am aware of it. Riftwatch is not so very far from my own familiar experience, but I daresay I engaged differently, then.” The ease with which she navigates Flint, particularly, reflects upon the position to which she might refer.

She is used to wielding authority, in one form or another, and it impacts everything.

“Which of our shared interests would you like to discuss?”

There is a beat where John almost says Flint, as if it were so easy, as if there is something that they can share between them to make Flint's position easier to hold.

But John does not say that.

Petrana de Cedoux is formidable in all the ways John knows best. (All of his life has been spent entreating or persuading or avoiding those with more authority and power than himself.) His thumb drags along the embossed vines on circling his cup, thinking of the words. Petrana is not Ilias or Matthias, not Leander, not Isaac.

"I know he's spoken to you of Nevarra," John begins, because are their interests not all linked around that beginning? Do they both not benefit in some way from Van Markham? "And I assume you have heard some rumors circulating about Tevinter's holdings in the North."

It is a very clean way to put it. (The endless, overlapping shouting in that tavern: They are all dead. The rebellion is ended and their leaders put to the sword.) John's gaze does not waver from her face.

"After the—" Incident? Tragedy? "After what happened in the Gallows, I have found myself wondering if there isn't a better way to make myself of use to him." Unexplained, assuming Petrana can divine who he is referring to without John speaking the name aloud. "And I think you might offer a unique perspective, if you'd be willing."

If she is trustworthy. But Flint would not have told her of Nevarra if she were anything other than that.

He.

It's hard to guess what it might signify, the way that he avoids Flint's name; if it might be significant or insubstantial. Indicative of something below the surface or just a man who is habitually indirect—she doesn't speculate so much as she observes. And will recall, later, slowly and methodically lining up the pieces of information that she gathers, some offered to her and some acquired.

“It behooves me to be,” she says, studying him over her cup, held comfortably in one hand with the other folded beneath. “Certainly, here, my experience is singular.” That's almost a joke, in a particularly gallows sort of humor, but she doesn't leave it the space to breathe it would need to be properly appreciated. “What has it put you in mind of? These developments.” In Nascere, in the Gallows.

She can think of a lot of things. A shorter list of things that might merit coming to her, but not so short she's comfortable leaping over the gap herself to an assumption. It seems unlikely magic is uninvolved,

but that could still mean a great many things.

Standing in the road in Nevarra, there had not been a great deal of time for John to consider exactly what he was doing. It had been much the same later on, caught between Ilias' knowing frown and the inevitability of supplies reaching a point they must not. Something needed to be done, so John had done it and left his regrets for the aftermath.

This moment, sitting across from Petrana, is a very different thing. It is an intentional leveraging. It is a risk. It is drawing close the parts of himself that scorch his palms every time he reaches for them and intentionally holding the up to the light.

It is not too late to get up and walk away. But John remains.

"Of things I've been withholding," John answers, surprisingly direct. "And whether or not it will be of any benefit to our purpose for me to continue to do so."

Petrana is not Flint, and she is not Madi. But there is still some relief in speaking this aloud, ruminating on it to someone relatively removed from the situation.

"Have you ever considered concealing your abilities? The anchor, perhaps can't be helped, but the rest..."

Easily done. Maybe more easily for her than it has been for John.

As thoughtful as she is, regarding him—what he might be withholding that would make her an appropriate confidante, the list of possibilities is short and all of them interesting—it's uncharacteristically plain as day that the question he asks takes her entirely off-guard. Not because she doesn't have an answer, or because it's difficult to,

rather, the opposite. It is so simple a thing; it had never even occurred to her, in those first days, as possible.

“When I came of age,” she says, after a pause, “to practise magic was a death sentence. Women who were discovered to have uncovered its secrets were burned at the stake, and their children granted deaths considered more merciful, certainly more private, to ensure that the sin would not be repeated.”

No story that begins with smothering children is going anywhere happy.

“My lord husband was a member of the royal family; a knight prince. The archiduc's own beloved nephew. When he was discovered to have done the same, he was exiled and his crimes were never publicized—he taught me magic. But l'Duc was not as witches are—impoverished, desperate. Female. Therefore, as he wielded flaming sword, the sin of it was always mine.”

Petrana spreads her hands— “My practise of witchcraft is just that: as a man might learn to wield a sword. When I was made into this, it was never my choice whether to conceal it or not; so long as my lord practised magic in public at a time when to do so courted death, I would always be blamed. That is something that I had to learn to wield, and to do otherwise here never entered my head.”

The recitation strikes a particular chord. It is a complimentary note. The points of her story are not the same as his, but they chime in the same way. It eases his own apprehensions to a point. Petrana is still a danger, and what means to tell her is still a risk to him. But the ugliness of it, the unspooling of learning to wield this power that would just as likely cause your death as it would bring you prosperity, that is familiar to John.

When I was made into this—

"And have you found it a type of protection, or has it invited further danger into your life here?"

The answer will not be so simple. John knows this. But he wishes it were, because maybe it would settle some of his own doubts to hear Petrana give an easy assessment of this type of power.

It isn't a simple answer, no, but then: their stories do not neatly align, and Petrana has never allowed herself to forget (been allowed to forget) that she is something different to a mage of Thedas. If she had no more magic than a rock, no more than only the anchor-shard binding her to Riftwatch,

“A rifter without my talents will face the same condemnation to whatever Circle her divinity attempts to consign us along with Riftwatch's mages to when she is done with her March,” she says, not unkindly, “just the same as myself, or Enchanter Julius. I possess no gifts that I might bend to my own protection save kinship. The hearth-magic that I amused my children with will not stop a Templar any more than they would have stopped a church knight, had I not spent my early marriage accompanied by a mercenary queensguard at all times.”

The simplest answer would be no, but Petrana isn't entirely satisfied with that.

“That kinship, however, has been invaluable to me.”

Kinship echoes in his mind the way tether does. They promise the same things.

Their magics are different. John had never quite known what Petrana was capable of, other than she gave the impression of someone capable of wielding great power so quietly the blow would fall before anyone had realized she'd moved. He understands better where that impression came from, how she cultivated it. What else could she be, all things considered?

"I understand," John begins, one hand pressing absently against the ache above his knee. It is a moment before he continues, "I'm still acclimating to that kind of...connection, as I have found it."

It's true and untrue. He has had years to grow used to the ties binding him to Flint, the tether winding across oceans to Madi. But the newly-minted links to Isaac and Ilias, Leander, Matthias, those are not easily integrated.

The implication of that statement is weighted. Petrana talks of kinship, the way she is tied to the fate of Thedas' mages, of Julius. John aligns himself quietly with those links, though if he had his way he would never be so closely looped in with their fates.

Her half-smile invites a certain sense of intimacy that she often seems aloof from; there are those who think warmly of her who nevertheless might have hesitated to invite her to bunk off work and drink wine in the shade. Woman who will shift the weight of the world tends not to sit easily alongside woman who will snort wine through her nose at a particularly well-timed witticism, even if both are demonstrably true.

It is a knowing sort of smile. It is the moment of understanding, as she realises what it is that John Silver is entrusting her with.

“It was new to me, as well, once,” she says, both because it's true and because she thinks it will matter. “We dismantled the church, and its cruel laws—I was shocked, in the first court I established, how many witches emerged from the woodwork when we declared it a safe harbor for them. But I was—”

A little shrug, elegant.

“I could not be their friend as well as their queen. When I sat beside my husband in the imperial palace, I felt as far from those women as I had ever been. Thedas, from the first, was a revelation.”

Edited 2020-08-26 10:35 (UTC)

There is comfort in this. However deliberate John's motivations, Petrana's small smile soothes some ache, quiets an endless jangling of nerves.

"I've never taken to it easily."

Kinship. The acceptance of care, the concern of another. It is hard to rely upon, worlds away from the kind of easy acquaintanceship John is accustomed to forming and abandoning at his leisure. Learning has been a long, difficult road. He had stood apart for so long that easing into such connectivity had been as difficult as the illness after his leg had been taken. It had taken him time to reconcile himself to the idea that he would no longer be able to simply walk away from what he'd started.

"And I'm just a man. I haven't even managed to pull down a church yet."

A certainty. Flint's voice in a half-dark room: I'm going to burn down that fucking house. It's couched in humor, a twitch of John's mouth before he drinks, but beneath the amusement there is hard truth.

"Do you prefer it? Being known?"

It isn't an easy question to answer. Petrana is aware, in the abstract, that perhaps it should be—she should simply say yes, and mean it, and that needs must be all. The soothing answer; yes, I promise, it's worth it.

She says, finally, “It is in its way the much more difficult path. There are times that I would not, yet—I experienced it, knowing, far less in Sulleciel. To do so was always significant, and for the woman who I was and might have been to have gone to her death taking perhaps the whole of herself with her...”

She grieved that death when she remembered it; in part for herself, but in part as a separate thing from herself entirely. A woman who had never been her, here, who had never known the things she's come to, and never thereafter would.

“It is the more difficult path, and I would not exchange it.”

Petrana's answer goes echoing through him. It is a confirmation of many things John had already known. The entire journey back from Nevarra had given him more than enough time to ruminate on how to move forward, and what he had admitted aloud to Flint had been a conscious choice to make his life, Flint's life, more difficult.

If there had been grief, that had come before. In the long stretch of time after his leg had been taken, where John could do nothing but mourn all that had been taken from him along with it. How strange it is to look back and see the way this moment connects to that, how the impact of those decisions continue to echo into his present. (And further, beyond to a past that John never—)

"That's reassuring," John says finally. She has been honest. It is not necessarily a comfort, but there is some cold satisfaction in the understanding that his instincts had been correct.

"I'm not blind to the utility of it," He continues. It. Magic. The truth. He swirls the wine in his cup. "Nor what it's cost to keep it quiet."

Unspoken: what it's cost Flint.

"But it seems impossible that I would find the same satisfaction in claiming it that you seem to have."

“All things cost,” Petrana says, with terrible simplicity. “All choices. What satisfies me—”

She considers his cup, for a moment. Her own. The garden they sit in, and all the moments (choices) that led to their doing so.

“In Thedas,” she says, finally, “the price I pay is of my choosing. Andraste said, magic is meant to serve man, never to rule over him. Which has secrecy done you?”

A secret can at any moment become a noose. This secret, particularly, and that she could never keep it herself is precisely how she knows it so well. It is doubtful that Petrana's particular interpretation of one of the Chantry's favourite quotations of the Maker's Bride would be very popular with the Chantry, but they'd have to have indulged in a good deal more wine than they have for what she's getting at to be particularly subtle.

(If you ask Petrana, forcing men to be ruled by magic is all the Chantry has been doing for centuries.)

Edited 2020-09-02 11:28 (UTC)

There is a grim twitch of a smile in response. He is alive. He has survived this long. If he had not so thoroughly concealed the truth of himself, he might have been killed a long time ago, or worse. (This is a truth. It is part of a truth. It is what John knows to be true.)

But Petrana is right. This is the point where the shield he's made of it becomes a liability, where it dissolves in his hands and he's left with nothing. (If there is a noose, it came to him before. If there is a noose, it was around his neck when he cut the fore-stay instead of taking his chances with escape.

"I'm comfortable with a certain amount of risk, if it benefits our business," John says, before clarifying what he feels she knows already: "What Flint and I came here to accomplish."

As if that is still such a recognizable thing. As if it has not become a larger task, taking on more and more necessary labors until John no could longer divine a straightforward path to a single goal.

"He asked me how I envisioned moving forward. I have my own instincts, but I'd hear yours first."

Another time she might—perhaps another time she will—press him more directly on the matter of what it is that he and Flint came to Riftwatch to accomplish, and what shape that goal has now. She little doubts it has changed in part or ultimate whole, though she wonders if they see it so.

Here and now, she pins it to her memory and keeps her peace. Says, instead, “Mere hiding is one thing; my instinct, as you say, is to make a virtue of what's before us.” It is quite something to apply virtuous to John Silver, but nevertheless she perseveres: “A strategy. You would benefit greatly from more thorough instruction,” she does not say proper instruction not because she is tactful (though she is) but because it isn't what she means, “and the opportunity to explore as thoroughly your own aptitudes. I think, however, that we would be squandering an opportunity of equal value if you were to take up staff and tome tomorrow before all curious eyes.”

It is easy to say we, but Petrana de Cedoux doesn't push others to risks that she hasn't demonstrably been willing to take herself; it gives her words weight they might not otherwise have.

“We have experienced Enchanters with us, of multiple disciplines and temperaments; I would recommend Julius and Mssr Rowntree not merely for my own biases, but their proven teaching ability. And,” neatly, “their good sense and discretion. For you to keep this as an ace within your sleeve is an excellent start—that we might see where its deployment should have the most impact. But further, that you should lessen the ability of a loyalist or a Templar to take you off-guard in ignorance, in unfamiliarity—”

The benefits of that possibility are more than just the simply practical.

There is some quiet question that sparks in him, listening to her: Where have you been all this time?

He has been foolish to have left Petrana de Cedoux aside for so long. Listening to her, John can see the shape of what he had intimated to Flint in his office, still ash-smeared and singed from the attack in the Gallows. Petra speaks and that shape grows more solid, the hazy edges coming into focus. Her instincts echo and mirror his own. This is not an impossibility they are discussing.

Just for a moment, gently, his hand reaches to touch her wrist in silent gratitude, before passing to lift the bottle from where it's sat between them. Whether or not she recognizes that for what it is, not necessarily important.

"I've received some instruction," John says, though he isn't inclined to give Isaac's name up, nevermind Ilias or Leander. "I can't say it's been as thorough or traditional as some of our peers here, but it's serviceable."

And only bestowed of late. All that John has absorbed and what he had taught to himself prior to what had occurred on the road in Nevarra is unorthodox. The assumption had always been if a templar had cornered him he was as good as dead, so—

"I'd meant to speak with Julius, and Marcus Rowantree sooner or later," John continues, the implication of topic stretching beyond instruction hanging in the air after that statement. "But your recommendation is appreciated."

Not only for instruction. Petrana's endorsement carries weight, dispels some of John's uncertainty about them.

Maybe in a different life the small gesture wouldn't carry so much obvious weight; maybe she would've been able to take it for granted without understanding. Here, though—the number of people who presume to put their hands on her is vanishingly small, the number of those who've done it without her first initiating such things even smaller. She recognizes the purpose, here, because she has never reached for someone without purpose herself.

It changes the shape of her mouth, and that's all; but that's enough.

“In a Circle,” she observes, “you'd have had the benefit of many instructors—a particular Enchanter to oversee your mentorship, but a variety of instructors from whom you might learn lessons of equal value.”

Even after as long as she spent as the Inquisition's Kirkwall Ambassador, it's still assumed often enough that Petrana as a Rifter has no need or reason to know much of the world in which she now lives; its history, or the nitty-gritty of its present. For the most part, she's used that to her own advantage rather than protested the foolishness of it outright—but she makes no pretense, now, of having done anything less than thoroughly acquainted herself with what she speaks of.

“I don't say it in support of the Circles; you should have had the same opportunity elsewhere. I ought to have had that same opportunity, and I do hope that my daughter still may, in my absence. But—the assumption of an apostate is that you will not. It is therefore extremely beneficial for you to be more adequately prepared than you will be thought.”

—says the Rifter who passes Hightown gossip to her superior and discusses Tevinter intelligence with her ally.

A half-smile. “In due course. I think they will both be most interested in what you have to say; certainly, I am.”

And it will keep him alive longer, though Petrana is considering the question of John from a different angle entirely. Isaac's calm warnings about the inherent dangers of reaching for magic at all run parallel to the kind of pitfall Petrana seeks to address.

There will certainly be some benefit in have some mastery, when he will be underestimated and unseen. John knows that tactic. It's kept him alive for a very long time. His acceptance of Petrana's assessment is the incline of his head, rather than an assertion of what he has learned, what he can do with a little blood and the snapping of bone.

None of that is what he wants to welcome into the space between them.

"There are aspects of our business that I think...I think come into clearer focus when the truth of what I am accompanies them."

A wry smile.

"Our dedication to delivering some tangible change to this place isn't an idle consideration. You understand how invested I am, at this point."

Petrana doesn't know about Madi, but maybe she'd understand even without that specific element of John's life being unveiled. Don't they all hope for some safe, quiet place to settle in without fear that pain and recrimination will shatter all the windows and drag them out over the shards of glass?

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