[closed] if you're here and I'm here then who's flying the plane

[katabasis]

WHO: Flint & Yseult
WHAT: Trust exercises
WHEN: Immediately pre-hasmal invasion
WHERE: Near Hasmal
NOTES: will include content warning in subject lines if applicable

It's almost guaranteed that their contact has utilized the flow of refugees across the border and toward Hasmal as a cover to pass into the South, though they aren't meant to meet them in that. Doubtless every breed of intelligencier currently peddles their trade there, for if an agent of one secret network might slip in that direction then why not agents of all?

Rather, after crossing the broad width of the Minanter on one of the point-nosed ferries (in the company of a pilot with a near supernatural skill for weaseling extra coin out of pocket, but who tactfully neglects to intervene in the debate his passengers are engaged in), they hire a pair of horses and turn west toward what is allegedly an all but forgotten trading post by the name of Drake's Landing which is said to boast such luxuries as a nearly empty inn and the cheapest drink in the political tri-corner.

At some point—perhaps after the fourth or fifth narrow bridge that they have to coax the horses across, for the landscape is threaded through with twisting offshoots of the Minanter—Flint remarks, "If we come this way again, it would be faster to row in."

Maybe that's how the Venatori beat them to the Landing. Or maybe the ferry pilot had a raven in the little cabin at the back of his boat who had carried word of a certain notable captain of Riftwatch swiftly North.

Regardless—

Comments

[katabasis]

There is no flickering reply in Fidan's face for it. The point of her focus is hard and unwavering, as constant as the knife's sizzling hiss has become irregular. It pops and cracks, the smell of burning dwindling as the last dregs of Yseult's blood scorches then flakes free.

"To what end do you imagine?" she asks, though it's hardly a question. Tell me, she'd said first.

"East," Flint supplies from the lamplight's edge, though the shape of his voice fails to draw her attention. "The Minanter to Starkhaven."

"That isn't what I asked," Fidan tells Yseult. "Why Starkhaven?"

[hassaran]

Yseult considers playing for time, rolling eyes back as if into a swoon. She hasn't really lost enough blood for that, but perhaps Nina could be forgiven for finding the situation overwhelming. But Fidan is watching her too fixedly and they're probably already past the point where delicate nerves would have failed. The answer's there in the question, but it's not an answer they're meant to know yet. Easier to catch quarry that doesn't know it's being chased.

"To control the river," she says instead, almost flippant, "Split the March. For the Glory of the Elder One." Huzzah.

[katabasis]

That persistent study remains for a moment, for two while in Fidan's fist that little knife has cleaned itself enough for its edge to once more glint liquid-bright in the aureate lamplight. Then she turns her hand and the knife is sheathed.

"Slowly then," she says and takes a further step back. She turns her attention to Flint. "Send word should you recall any further detail, won't you Commander? I don't believe anyone will come along again for some time, but if you shout loud enough then the guard at the end of the corridor may hear you."

The lamp is removed from its hook. Fidan takes it with her when she goes.

[hassaran]

Yseult doesn't flinch under that study, a twitch of nose and one corner of her mouth suggesting an uncharacteristic sneer to go with the clenched jaw, gaze locked despite the flash of the blade in her peripheral vision. She drops that look too when the door shuts, head slumped back against the rack.

"It's better if they don't know we know about the gates," she says when footsteps have receded. "Something less specific might satisfy them without revealing it. I can't tell whether she's bluffing."

[katabasis]

The dark left behind in the absence of the lamp is thick and weighted, denser still for all the hours they've spent in that half illumination. Somewhere in the back of his mind: a high buzzing as a series of considerations wind into a tight fist shape. The wound should be flushed and dressed; his hands are bound behind him and so are hers.

"She was willing to expose herself as a mage to get that answer out of you. Why resume the lie?"

In the dark, the rasp of a chain over wood. It's an impulsive snap against the point of restraint—momentarily entertaining the idea that if they truly have been left to their own supervision, then the least he might do is attempt some headway on the soft wood of the old rack. It's a quickly discarded notion. Instead—

"How bad is it?"

[hassaran]

"Which lie?" is an answer as much to the second question as the first--not that she's never failed to follow him before, but she never admits it, not when she could instead circle around the issue another way and wait for it to clarify itself. The dark is a relief after days of squinting in the half-light. They don't have anything to clean the wound with anyway.

"Infection may come before blood loss. A day or two. If you'd prefer to sleep on it."

[katabasis]

In reality, the beat of his silence is brief. It only feels to him longer as it's filled with a brief moment of self-interrogation and re-examination of his own logic motivated by her confusion. There is the smallest shadow of doubt there, mercifully shrouded in the darkness.

"She'd decided we were short on time before arriving. The only reason to not have the rest of it out of you in this moment is because we gave her what she needed," he says into the shaded room. It's possible though, isn't it? That the appearance of her impatience had been merely affect to induce this very train of thought. He lingers over the arrangement of that possibility for a moment. But what is clear:

"'Slowly' gets her nothing if the goal of this was to safeguard a push into the Marches."

A day or two. That too an uncertainty.

[hassaran]

Yseult measures the space of that silence in heartbeats, uncommonly aware of each pulse, the resulting thrum of blood through her body. She tries to set that aside and focus on Flint's explanation, carry the threads of those thoughts forward to some conclusion. It's painful to breathe deeply, a struggle to stay both shallow and slow.

"If Starkhaven alone is enough, it must be wrong." She's less sure than she sounds, the line of logic slippery in her grasp. "She'd have asked what we'd planned." Wouldn't she? "The wait to confirm we're not holding back. Or the magic wasn't urgency, just changing the game."

[katabasis]

For an untethered beat, he nearly follows that lead—the tempting impulse to interrogate some unknowable motivation, to take some wild speculative shot in the dark after some target they have fully imagined the dimensions of.

Then, clipped— "We'll know for certain if she doesn't return in the hour. Tell me if the bleeding continues."

Maker only fucking knows the fully effects of that ugly knife. Or how to measure the passage of an hour in the pitch darkness with nothing but suspicion, the thud of his pulse heavy in his knee, and the uneven shape of Yseult's breathing. But it can't have been that long by the time that Flint raises his voice to call for the guard. It's a bark to carry over gales and regardless of whether it sounds hoarse and compressed in this little storeroom, there can be little doubt that someone will have heard if they're listening. That someone will come if they are required to.

Instead, silence is the answer both in this hour and in reply to any successive attempt to draw attention down to this little storeroom. There is no lamp to keep lit. There is no water in a well turned wooden cup. True to Fidan's word, no one at all attends to them in the long stretch that follows.

[hassaran]

The bleeding gradually slows to a stop over what passes as an hour. Not for good, as over the following however-many the wounds prove themselves easily reopened with even careful movement, edges tugged on with every breath or shift, the singed fibers in her shirt catching in the scab. Aside from another conversation about what they intend to say should anyone ever answer Flint's shouting, a revisiting of what it might mean that they have not yet done so, Yseult is silent.

That long stretch drags on, until broken finally by a soft slide of cloth against wood followed by a loose thump of flesh deadweight against dirt, the clank of shackles. There's a muffled sound of pain, and then a scramble of limbs and chain moving away from him followed by retching and ragged breath. She spits, and says, hoarse, "There's the infection."

[katabasis]

There it is.

In the dark, wrists raw from the shift of chain and iron and throat raw from the attempt to hail some answer from the beyond the storeroom door, it's easy to imagine some sour tang lingering in the air on behalf of it. It's the memory shape of the scent—putrifaction and poultices in combination—which comes to permeate every lower deck surgeon's ward and for'ard bulkhead space in the aftermath of bloody fighting. If it isn't real here yet, then it lies in wait alongside fever and disorientation—more ravenous, he thinks, given the lack of either water or fresh air.

"Someone will come before it's run it's course."

He has decided to be confident on this point. What use is there in contemplating the alternative (though in the back of his head, he does compulsively make to turn it over; if they were to leave her here—)? Meanwhile, so long as someone comes then there are options yet available to them.

"I don't believe I ever thanked you for that book."

[hassaran]

It takes Yseult a moment to respond--the too-quick huff of her breath intermittently held in silence is explanation enough. By the time she's regulated it to no longer fill the space between them, she's worked out what he means. "For Satinalia?" Mostly. "I can't remember what it was."

[katabasis]

He makes himself wait, to be patient though that dark and the quiet from beyond the door is designed to induce the opposite. There is a natural instinct to be repelled by the possibility of being discarded and forgotten; he refuses still to think overlong about that hole Valeriantus had been cast down.

(If they die in some stuffy Hasmal cellar as a product of all that, he will have a few complaints.)

"And here I thought it might be some pointed character assessment. It was the account of a Rivaini sea captain," he says. "He disappears across the Amaranthine."

[hassaran]

"Oh. The Alrazin." She laughs, very briefly, as it comes back, and swallows whatever pain that must cause. "Did you enjoy it? I thought it seemed doubly appropriate."

[katabasis]

(On a ship, canvas is rigged to funnel fresh air through open port hatches down to the surgeon's orlop, is a stray thought and inconsequential to the extreme under their present conditions. Though is it surprising that any impulse honed over thirty years should stick?)

The sound he makes hums low in the dark, reservation and affirmation both.

"Irritatingly, yes."

[hassaran]

She makes a sound like a smile, like that's precisely the reaction she'd intended. (It was.) "Are you wishing you had followed his example?"

Once, in a momentary fit of impracticality, Yseult proposed to Darras that they give up their careers and sale off across the Amaranthine themselves to explore something other than the depths of Thedas's shadowy underworld or the yawning gap between their moral codes. As all good partners should he took up her slack, took on the temporarily abandoned role of realist to raise doubts sufficient to sink that idea in its berth. It wasn't Riftwatch then that drove her to suggest it, but Yseult thinks of it now. Did Alrazin meet a better end than this? Maybe, maybe not. If nothing else he was certain of his priorities.

[katabasis]

"Right in this moment? Possibly."

Although there are plenty of ways to be miserable on a ship, particularly one which has fallen off the edge of the world. Certainly they're all more romantically imagined than sitting on a floor in a dark room with a shattered knee, but what practical difference does that make?

"But ordinarily, no. Not really."

Bold words from the man who'd all but told her and Byerly that he'd given defecting from Riftwatch serious consideration.

[hassaran]

Who hasn't? They didn't have all those dreams for nothing.

Yseult is both generally uninterested in philosophizing and ill-equipped for the sort of abstraction it requires. And impending death isn't about to increase her patience. But the sound she makes--the second one, after a little hum of agreement that being elsewhere might be preferable--is sort of musing, both on what he's said and on what she might say next, which ends up being:

"Are you sure you're not already? The double meaning of the gift was intended more as warning than suggestion."

[katabasis]

"I'm not sure the Viscount would be entirely pleased to hear that you consider Kirkwall the equivalent of disappearing from the map."

No, her intended meaning hadn't gone entirely over his head then any more than it does now. But he's had his proverbial knuckles slapped for pontificating once already. Why press some broad point when she's plenty miserable all without his assistance?

[hassaran]

"He might be relieved if it did," might not quite make sense grammatically, but anyone who's seen Bran knows he was already tired when he took over the job ten? fifteen? years ago.

"I don't know how long I'll remain lucid," she says after a moment or two, with some of that deliberate matter-of-factness that is so often irritating in meetings. "If you should escape, I would appreciate it if you told Darras that I said I'm sorry."

[katabasis]

There are men who would, given the extent of their current circumstances, take this as license to reassure. Tell him yourself, he might say. Or that he isn't leaving without her. Or some nonsense about how ridiculously overdramatic she will feel when, in a few hours' time, she has been seen and tended to. It's a natural impulse, isn't it? To dismiss the sort of concern she's speaking to when there's so little that can actually be done to alleviate the cause.

More dismally, equally unspoken: if she dies, it seems highly unlikely that he would return to Riftwatch any time soon to make those apologies for her.

But if either thought occurs to Flint in the dark (and they must; this isn't the first time he has sat in a cage, and he has argued similar points to himself before), neither shows. His ready answer, without preamble—

"I will. I'll see that he hears it."

[hassaran]

"Thank you." Yseult can at least be relied on not to make it any more dramatic than anything so near to death inevitably, inherently is. If it can't be done, it can't; if it can, it will. That's as much certainty as anyone can reasonably ask for.

"I've been nearly killed a number of times," she says, in the same tone in which someone might comment on a town they've visited before, "Several in ways that felt quite stupid. I confess I'd rather thought if I survived all that, it would be for something. Not storybook heroics," to head off mockery, "but this is a bit of a waste, isn't it."

[katabasis]

In the dark, it's difficult to say whether he looks at her or not. But maybe he does, fetching out the vague outlines of her shape from the gloom and measuring them. After she falls silent, he's quiet for a beat after which must indicate the turning over and examining of a thought, not that he doesn't have one or twelve. It's the shadow of a checked impulse. Then—

"In this room, yes. It is." Has he ever seen a death that wasn't a waste? That wasn't both more and less brutal or consequential than it was meant to be?

"But if we're right and Tevinter goes in the direction we imagine, then Riftwatch will need to be moved to be effective. You and I may not be particularly popular members of that company"—has the brittle curve of dry humor to it, though it lands less effectively than it might without a look to punctuate it—"But it's a good story. And someone will find a way of turning it to their advantage."

[hassaran]

Yseult's thinking less of deaths she's seen than those she hasn't, deaths avoided or imagined. Blades she's stepped in front of, people she would not have minded dying to shield or dying beside, some it might even have been worth dying to kill. If she'd met her end on the field at Ghislain, or in Taviano's cabin, or on the side of a road twenty-five years ago, would that have been better somehow? Maybe it's just pride that's soured this, sucked any sense of purpose out of it. They could at least be killing her for who she is. That's too stupid a thought to say aloud.

"Silver and Bastien will manage it, I'm sure. Between them they might even convince the others they liked us after all. Perhaps that's best for everyone. Riftwatch gets a unifying tragedy and more pleasant leaders, and we don't have to bother with it anymore."

[katabasis]

He has some sense of it—the indignity of the thing. Not just here in this room, but in what he's posed. There is a certain lack of satisfaction in seeing some post by the roadway to which some burden must be carried and then being made to set it down before passing it. Fine. Someone else will be as capable of carrying it. That's true. But it's a long fucking way to have come for no discernable—What? Reward? Had that been the point in picking the thing up to begin with?

(No. But yes.)

"Who said anything about being unpleasant?"