“Twenty-three or twenty-four,” she says, “the Gallows was still an Inquisition outpost and I was, at the time, technically considered a guest of the Inquisition, called Lady Gwenaëlle Vauquelin, with my upkeep paid care of l'Comte de Vauquelin. Not a prisoner in the same way that neither of us are prisoners, exactly,”
with a tilt of her anchored hand,
“just unable to leave. I hadn't thought much about what anyone might see, looking at me, so it was a sharp shock to realise that she had thought about it a great deal— about how the Inquisition propaganda that I'd written, for all the much nothing good it'd done, had then made me effectively what everyone saw, looking to Skyhold. A lady's observations. There was a sketch of me on every copy, which I hadn't liked, but I had this idea that people would read the things I wrote the way that I intended.”
Best laid plans, and all that.
“I remember she said, you have chosen to be the face of the Inquisition, and I'd worried about her thinking me childish,” a childish worry to have, Coupe had thought at the time, not inaccurately, “and I hated it at once. It wasn't what I'd meant to do.”
(Everyone who's ever been frustrated in their efforts to spark her to the same sort of writing again can thank that one moment for her utter stubbornness in refusal. Including, as it had happened, Luwenna Coupe.)
“I thought a great deal about the way that she looked at me across— well, always across something. Across a table. Across an argument. Across my uncle's knife, which I used less as she taught me more. It isn't really fit for practical purpose— it's a dangerous jewel. I'd assumed the other one was lost, somewhere, or stolen by one of the Templars that had done the Annulment, sold for less than it was worth to some war profiteer in Orlais. I was astonished, I remember, when Aura Hardie,”
yes, like the dog,
“wrote to me that she'd met the man who'd had it made for me, hiding in ruins and trading healing magic for food and a blind eye from small villages. Proving his use to the Avvar. I was astonished,” she says, distinctly, “but la limier was not. A lone, lost mage, long presumed dead, alive on the run for years, and the mage hunter, a Templar of his Circle, who I'd never really thought to connect to him because there were a lot of mages there, and a lot of Templars, and frankly I didn't know very much about what that entailed— she wasn't surprised. She wasn't meant to know, she said. Very well: no one had been meant to know. I had always believed him to be dead because my father had always believed that if he had lived, he would have known. I decided he would die not knowing different. But why, I wondered, would Luwenna Coupe have thought he might intend for her to know?”
The tilt of her head recollects another moment, sat across a table in a kitchen she has rarely stepped foot in, poised as a pocket cameo, a portrait to hang upon a chain, pitiless in her pursuit of this knowledge:
“He was a friend, she said. He was the brightest part of her life, she told me. And he had killed two of her men. Only, I thought. Rather restrained, all things considered.”
no subject
“Twenty-three or twenty-four,” she says, “the Gallows was still an Inquisition outpost and I was, at the time, technically considered a guest of the Inquisition, called Lady Gwenaëlle Vauquelin, with my upkeep paid care of l'Comte de Vauquelin. Not a prisoner in the same way that neither of us are prisoners, exactly,”
with a tilt of her anchored hand,
“just unable to leave. I hadn't thought much about what anyone might see, looking at me, so it was a sharp shock to realise that she had thought about it a great deal— about how the Inquisition propaganda that I'd written, for all the much nothing good it'd done, had then made me effectively what everyone saw, looking to Skyhold. A lady's observations. There was a sketch of me on every copy, which I hadn't liked, but I had this idea that people would read the things I wrote the way that I intended.”
Best laid plans, and all that.
“I remember she said, you have chosen to be the face of the Inquisition, and I'd worried about her thinking me childish,” a childish worry to have, Coupe had thought at the time, not inaccurately, “and I hated it at once. It wasn't what I'd meant to do.”
(Everyone who's ever been frustrated in their efforts to spark her to the same sort of writing again can thank that one moment for her utter stubbornness in refusal. Including, as it had happened, Luwenna Coupe.)
“I thought a great deal about the way that she looked at me across— well, always across something. Across a table. Across an argument. Across my uncle's knife, which I used less as she taught me more. It isn't really fit for practical purpose— it's a dangerous jewel. I'd assumed the other one was lost, somewhere, or stolen by one of the Templars that had done the Annulment, sold for less than it was worth to some war profiteer in Orlais. I was astonished, I remember, when Aura Hardie,”
yes, like the dog,
“wrote to me that she'd met the man who'd had it made for me, hiding in ruins and trading healing magic for food and a blind eye from small villages. Proving his use to the Avvar. I was astonished,” she says, distinctly, “but la limier was not. A lone, lost mage, long presumed dead, alive on the run for years, and the mage hunter, a Templar of his Circle, who I'd never really thought to connect to him because there were a lot of mages there, and a lot of Templars, and frankly I didn't know very much about what that entailed— she wasn't surprised. She wasn't meant to know, she said. Very well: no one had been meant to know. I had always believed him to be dead because my father had always believed that if he had lived, he would have known. I decided he would die not knowing different. But why, I wondered, would Luwenna Coupe have thought he might intend for her to know?”
The tilt of her head recollects another moment, sat across a table in a kitchen she has rarely stepped foot in, poised as a pocket cameo, a portrait to hang upon a chain, pitiless in her pursuit of this knowledge:
“He was a friend, she said. He was the brightest part of her life, she told me. And he had killed two of her men. Only, I thought. Rather restrained, all things considered.”