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

Entry tags:

james flint,
yseult

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

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—

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"You might. Or at least from more convincing dishonesty. This middle path you've chosen was the worst of both worlds."

She still sounds more dryly amused than anything, like his secret agenda--its existence an open secret since the Nevarran Papers even if its details remain obscure--is a sort of almost-charming eccentricity. It's difficult to be too concerned with its potential for future complications just at the moment.

"I can live with mismatched priorities." A beat. Even drier: "I very literally do. It's knowing there's something I might trip over in the dark but not what or where that I can't abide. Blood magic might at least provide some refreshing certainty."

In a different place, it might rankle against the suspicious instinct that he has been honest enough. That half certainties must be adequate, and that anything more is a dangerous luxury, and fuck whoever demands a debt of him.

Here in the dark, Flint snorts.

"Is that all? I'll see if I can't conjure any if by some miracle we do leave here."

Of their own volition. If it's under the power of the Venatori and she isn't just left as a corpse on the floor of this store room, he expects they'll have little choice on becoming better acquainted with the practice.

"After twenty years a spy," is a verbal shrug of explanation, "Dangers don't trouble me half as much as unknowns."

Several months from now when Byerly demands the identity of her (former-ish) employer and laments the lack of trust her refusal inspires, perhaps she ought to feel some pang of hypocrisy. Perhaps the effect of fever on the memory can be blamed for the fact that she doesn't.

"You might tell me now. There's little to lose with the chance I'll remember slimming by the moment."

He might.

Beyond the heavy door that he knows to be at the end of the storage room, the corridor is quiet. It's hard to say how long it's been since the elven woman left them, and at what rate Yseult is bleeding through her fingers, and how much longer they can sit here in the dark before it won't matter anymore. She's still putting sentences together; if left to their own devices, there will likely be more hours where she's feverish and insensible than not. Maybe in the aftermath of that, this narrow slice of time between two states will seem strangely manufactured.

Flint huffs out another breath through his nose, loud in the still room. This one's humorless. A sound of frustration or surrender or that of a winded runner.

"We came to Kirkwall with the intention of engaging the Inquisition to help rid my island of the Venatori and close the rift there. But I wanted it done in such a way that no one would dare try to follow after them. That would mean doing more than just driving Corypheus' agents off it. It would have required empowering an island of pirates and heretics at the edge of the Qun who might have been easily posed to make themselves a threat to northern trade.

"When we arrived at the Gallows, it was to find the Inquisition sending a contingent of diplomats to Minrathous and leadership unwilling to cut the very head off the snake. It become apparent to me then that the Inquisition would have little interest in meaningfully assisting Nascere if it meant making themselves unpopular in the south. Any safety secured for my home would have been temporary at best, and I dislike being required to live with a sword in reach."

Yseult is silent for a minute or two. It's difficult to say how much of the trouble she has parsing this information is due to the combination of blood loss and rising fever versus Flint's habit of talking around his central point and assuming it's as obvious to others from the outline as it is to him versus her own fundamental inability to conceive of a plan like his. The result is puzzlement regardless.

She doesn't mean it to sound as flippant as it might when she replies, "An island of pirates and heretics poised to threaten the Qun and northern trade isn't a place where you'd live with a sword in reach?"

In the dark, those are long minutes. His answer comes readily enough, though.

"It could have been."

The minutes stretch longer still. To no avail.

"How?"

How. He can feel the line of his mouth flex; maybe the grim humor of it's audible.

"The way all nations are formed. Eventually the arm behind a sword becomes strong enough that it no longer requires the blade for leverage."

Her exhale is short and wry. A soft thump announces the back of her head meeting the shelf.

"Pretend for a moment that my upbringing included very little study of political philosophy. How do you do that? --I presume," it's almost aside, "the arm in question is yours."

Here, a laugh. It's exhausted by merit of their situation. It's made genuine by the simplicity of her agony. Maybe this version of torture is a preferable distraction from the other kind.

"Nascere could have proven its independence by routing the Venatori there and dispensing with Tevinter's claim on the island. With the Inquisition's endorsement, it might have found the means to entice the fighters on Seheron to join it's force, raided the Imperium's mines and liberated the slaves there. It could have razed Alam, captured Ath Velanis, and made the Straits into a place so feared by the Antivan merchant trade and coveted by the Qun that the south would have no choice but to recognize it or else risk the encroachment of Par Vollen."

Is that practical enough an example to satisfy her? Unlikely. It hinges on mights, and coulds, and perhapses.

"If enough people recognize something as true, then it is. And no one has to raise a sword to defend what everyone knows."

It is a great many mights and coulds and perhapses, and even now it immediately begs a dozen more iterations of her question. How could one small island of unruly pirates be organized enough to do anything? How could they raze Alam or capture Ath Velanis? How could they be enough to make any dent in Seheron, where two great powers have failed for Ages? How do these pretty maxims account for even the present war's many demonstrations that recognition is no guarantee of safety within or without? How does any of this theory become reality?

Another day, the temptation to press and probe at the loose weave of this vision might win out. Now, she can't be arsed. There's only one question that really matters, anyway. "To what end?"

They're carrying on a conversation better suited to a study while chained in a dark Hasmal cellar as she bleeds through her fingers and he can't lift his arms without flinching, yet the absurdity of that question still surprises him.

"What do you mean to what end?"

It's followed immediately by a second sawn laugh, reflexive and bewildered and an entirely different kind of exhausted. This must be what madness feels like—trapped in a pit with only someone who speaks the wrong language and the unrelenting urge to communicate for company. Flint checks himself from laughing again, though can feel the impulse of its mania lingering behind his ribs.

"To make a place here livable. Sailing off the edge of the world may be well and good for Alrazin, but it doesn't do anything for anyone stuck on the map."

Yseult wonders if at some point she went delirious already without noticing, or unwittingly dozed off for some crucial minutes of the conversation. "What would make that place more livable than anywhere else? That you would rule it?"

Clearly Flint has come to a similar conclusion. Maybe those minutes of silence had been her lapsing out of consciousness.

"I don't expect you to understand right now."

"You know, I only pretend to read minds." She somehow sounds like her eyes are closed, head tipped back to catch her breath. "And if you already said I didn't hear it."

She might leave it there, but "Come on, what else are we going to talk about while I die?" Surely this can't be worse than fading away in his disgruntled silence. "I know how you enjoy speaking to me like I'm stupid; now's your chance."

The clenched fist feeling in his chest that had started as that off kilter humor is meant to harden into something furious in answer to that goading. Instead it sits there, cooling and refusing to become anything else but a knot to breath around. He's tired. That vague passing inkling of despair is familiar, and all at once he's violently ill with something best called homesickness.

So for a long measure, the silence extends. It probably sounds like snub nosed obstinacy. In a sense it is. He doesn't, actually—enjoy it.

"If Corypheus we're pulled down tomorrow. What happens then?"

"We die here for even less?" is not actually her answer. That takes another moment. She tries not to sound as weary as the question makes her; she did ask for this. But it's a reminder that it isn't getting any easier to imagine the end of this war, even when the chance she'll live to see it isn't slipping through her fingers as they speak.

She achieves at least the rough approximation of her usual tone, enough for the intention to be clear. "Tevinter tears itself apart deciding who rules next. The Qun takes advantage of the opportunity. The mage war begins again. Riftwatch dissolves into a half-dozen different causes."

Edited 2022-01-02 00:12 (UTC)

If he's at all surprised by the grim nature of his assessment—or the fact that it aligns so closing with his—, little trace of it exists in his voice. The point is that none of it sounds like a particularly welcome climate in which to live.

"Then you know that the luxury of being singleminded about pursuing Corypheus is something few can afford. There must be arrangements made now to guarantee that what follows isn't more of the same."

It is near to a worst-case scenario, at least among scenarios where the war ends anytime soon with the defeat of Corypheus and without the destruction of any more major cities. Another day, in another place, she might give a more nuanced guess—the mage war might begin again, to a smaller degree, if x, y, and z do not happen—but she could be forgiven for painting with a broad black brush just at the moment.

"Such as?" Can he hear the implied 'starting a war in Nevarra as well?' in her tone?

Great news: he can.

"Making vulnerable a front that, if united, would have had little reason to bother with negotiating with anyone beyond their borders much less acting in their interests. We do this by suggesting that the way forward is with strange partners, or not at all."

Surely this is a subject with which she is painfully familiar.

"You fear the end of the war will bring instability, so your solution is to create more?" She sounds no more impressed with this notion than she did two (three? four?) years ago when he originally suggested it.

"Orlais is exhausted and Nevarra has lost its capital. Both will have reason enough to fear the conflict to the north spilling over. All you'd do is invite the Qun south. What is it you hope the Van Markhams or the mages will do for you?"

The whole answer is ready for her as if it's a coin he is holding in his hand. It fits easily on his palm. He can see the shape of it, ordered in a straight line.

She should know as well as he does the benefit of a feint. How, if the Qun is to be kept at bay then Tevinter must retain some measure of its strength. How to do that and best Corypheus would require showing those in the Imperium willing to see things differently that there is a way forward that is neither the Magisterium's or the Southern Chantry's. And so they must look be able to look south and see an alternative to what they revile there. They must hear it from the mages who ought to have every right to defect rather than to fights. And to do that, someone—he hardly cares who—must be moved to offer them an accord. The pheasant must be beaten from the bush. Someone must carry the stick.

But what he says is, "Tell me why it matters to you."

It's as well he can't see her face in the dark, because she is past caring what shows on it and finds this question every bit as absurd as he did hers.

"Why do I care about your aims? Or why do I care what happens to Nevarra? Or why do I care if--" whatever the third option was. There was one, maybe two. It slips her grasp, suddenly, like fish from a snapped line. Maybe it sounds like exasperation, the way she sputters to a halt for a moment and sighs. She breathes, then tries it simpler.

"When you imply your aim is stability, I don't believe you. I think you care more about ideas than people."

"If that's what you think then it won't matter what I say."

Not here, not outside of this room, and certainly not when she is bleeding out from who knows where at who knows what rate. Maybe it's a illusion produced by the darkness, but it sounds straightforward when he says it. Patient (tired) and simple.

This time it really is frustration that pushes out a weary laugh.

"You'll give me a grand plan for forcing the world to recognize a new nation but I ask you how this island you'd rule would be livable for people and you've nothing to say. What am I meant to think?"

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