So she has always thought, anyway, since she was told.
“I don't know when she knew that it was him who had done it. After she knew that he had survived, because that wasn't right away, either— but he mentioned it, once, in a letter. Obliquely. He's very good at being oblique in betters. That she had written letters, too, explaining away the deaths of those Templars.” Gwenaëlle doesn't say absolving because she doesn't think that's in Coupe's gift to give, and moreover, she doesn't think her uncle needs it any.
Whether or not it ever kept him up nights, she's never asked.
“I put the pieces together slowly,” she says, “the shape of them, it wasn't all at once. We were never— she was never Luwenna to me, so she was certainly never Wren, but I knew how she was called. I had these ideas that I would wait, you know, I'd wait until my lord was close to passing and then I would tell him that his brother had been alive, that he'd never told him, I'd take that away from him,”
and this is how you know it's family, the way that it hurts, the way that they know each other's wounds, the cruelty that needs love like fire needs fuel,
“but it didn't work out that way. The phylacteries were a point of contention— a cache of them was found. We were still part of the Inquisition, then. They were secured here in Kirkwall and they were going to be sent to the Chantry, I think? Which is as good as taking sides, in my opinion, but that wasn't a time when I was wading hip-deep into mage politics, so I mostly wasn't. The mages found out about it, big drama, and they went on strike about it, they didn't want decisions like that made for them behind closed doors, in conversations they weren't a part of. My uncle arrived in Kirkwall the day it kicked off, having stopped to see my lord first, which I didn't love, and came to see me before he carried onto the Gallows. With my grandmother's ring,”
resigned,
“telling me his intention to propose marriage to one Luwenna Coupe. Which I also didn't love.”
no subject
So she has always thought, anyway, since she was told.
“I don't know when she knew that it was him who had done it. After she knew that he had survived, because that wasn't right away, either— but he mentioned it, once, in a letter. Obliquely. He's very good at being oblique in betters. That she had written letters, too, explaining away the deaths of those Templars.” Gwenaëlle doesn't say absolving because she doesn't think that's in Coupe's gift to give, and moreover, she doesn't think her uncle needs it any.
Whether or not it ever kept him up nights, she's never asked.
“I put the pieces together slowly,” she says, “the shape of them, it wasn't all at once. We were never— she was never Luwenna to me, so she was certainly never Wren, but I knew how she was called. I had these ideas that I would wait, you know, I'd wait until my lord was close to passing and then I would tell him that his brother had been alive, that he'd never told him, I'd take that away from him,”
and this is how you know it's family, the way that it hurts, the way that they know each other's wounds, the cruelty that needs love like fire needs fuel,
“but it didn't work out that way. The phylacteries were a point of contention— a cache of them was found. We were still part of the Inquisition, then. They were secured here in Kirkwall and they were going to be sent to the Chantry, I think? Which is as good as taking sides, in my opinion, but that wasn't a time when I was wading hip-deep into mage politics, so I mostly wasn't. The mages found out about it, big drama, and they went on strike about it, they didn't want decisions like that made for them behind closed doors, in conversations they weren't a part of. My uncle arrived in Kirkwall the day it kicked off, having stopped to see my lord first, which I didn't love, and came to see me before he carried onto the Gallows. With my grandmother's ring,”
resigned,
“telling me his intention to propose marriage to one Luwenna Coupe. Which I also didn't love.”