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Cullen knuckles a place next to his nose with a steel-clawed finger.
He stares at Andraste’s stone face, and doesn’t think about hair, dark, like ink spilling everywhere, over sharp, long ears and sloping cheeks, breaking across skin like fresh parchment, still smelling of wood presses. He swears he doesn’t.
He hears the end of her name come from somewhere far to his left. ‘Vellan. Some recruit, talking from half-remembered gossip probably gathered at mealtime. Cullen hasn’t the wits or the patience to chase it right now.
He stares at Andraste’s hard face, and thinks about shining things, good, clean, white, perfect, blinding with integrity. Or, tries. After not too long, her huge, blinking eyes infect his imagination like roots, black and twisting and full of pulsing poison.
Someone with a metal cap, winking in the sun, calls for him and gives him the distraction he was privately begging for. He shuffles after it with what dignity and authority he can summon to his side.
--
It was easier back at Haven, he thought, watching her chat easily to Josephine about a contender for the position of Divine. Cullen barely tried to keep from staring now; he had little left to lose at this rate in terms of his propriety towards the woman he should think of as the Herald, and Leliana had long ago tired of gawking at him for his behaviour and finding he had no shame to spare for it.
Josephine had never faulted him for any of it. Cullen wondered sometimes, with something like pity and also like envy, if clever Lady Montilyet with all her wits and airs hadn’t fallen for Ellana Lavellan, too. He thought he recognised that devoted, defeated way she danced around the girl-elf, seeming to forget her own prestige, seeming to abandon it entirely.
The prophet paid neither of them mind, though. She had her head somewhere distant, somewhere future. Cullen missed the look of her when he first saw her face: young as new spring, barely twenty, eyes big and kind and heart as pure as fresh snow. She seemed a spirit of the Fade to him then, something perfect and not-mortal, sewing up seams in the sky with a flick of her wrist and spinning her gnarled little staff like some exquisite dancer. He often tried to find the moment when the snow of her was trampled and dirtied by the things they asked of her. He wanted to be able to point to it exactly, to know down to the minute when he should have gone to her and said something, so he could blame himself more thoroughly.
She finally met his look, after Josephine had turned away. Her gaze was fog-coloured, grey and strange, winding ever-away. Just as he began to think of walking into it, and his mouth opened by a breath, she looked away again, her heart’s attention snatched by something else.
--
After the peace talks at Halamshiral, Leliana convinced Ellana to endure one more night of elbow-rubbing before setting off for home. Reluctant, but ever the martyr, Ellana agreed and was sewn into something layered and bosom-lifting and carted off to the palace of one Lord Renoite, a high baron of some esteem Cullen had not listened to when described to him the first time.
Josephine and Sister Nightingale loosed Cullen on the syrup-accented Orlesian ladies at once, leaving him to be fawned over as they steered conversations towards Ellana elsewhere. Cullen had begun to hate this behaviour of theirs the moment he first noticed it, months ago when Josephine introduced Ellana to some Antivan merchant prince’s son. He would be even stupider than they expected of him to not notice that they meant to use Ellana’s obvious youth and beauty to their own advantage by dangling her before potential suitors. Cullen only hoped it was an insincere thing they did to boost the Inquisition’s clout, rather than something they truly expected Lavellan to follow through on.
Ellana laughed at exactly the right moment when Renoite told her a joke. Cullen pretended to attach his attention to the swooning courtiers rather than the exact volume of summer wine the baron was successfully convincing Ellana to drink.
Cullen hated the things that floated from the baron’s mouth about Lavellan. He imagined himself stabbing the words, red and angry. He talks about her like she’s some animal, pretty and strange, to be mounted or locked away or whatever-he-pleases. Cullen did not know much about Lavellan’s clan because she largely kept to herself about such things, but he knew enough to be furious over someone she would term an ‘ignorant shemlen’ calling her an exotic creature.
He excused himself after only another hour, unable to bear the increasingly grating speech of the Orlesians as they sank ever-deeper into their wine casks. He was surprised when Ellana followed, following his complaint of being faint from drink.
“Not having fun?” he asked her, too bitterly, once they had ascended the stairwell and freed themselves from greedy earshot.
Ellana’s gaze was straight. “No, not so much.”
“Do I get to ask why?”
Ellana’s spine erected itself, and her strut lengthened with it. “Of course you do.”
“So, why not having fun?”
“I didn’t think you had to ask.” Indignant, she added anyway, “I feel like some foreign bird pet, toted around for everyone to ooh at. Does that satisfy you?”
His chest stung with responsibility. For noticing what was happening. For not saying a thing. “I’m sorry.”
“What? For asking? No, it’s fine.” Ellana’s face become still as water again. She tucked a lock of ebon hair behind one thin, jutting ear, sharp and strange to Cullen. She made him think of the mages in the circle towers, the only other elves he’d ever been near. “I feel better, almost.”
“No.” Cullen swallowed. “For not keeping you from it.”
Her steps slowed, without stopping. “What? No, don’t think that. That’s absurd.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“I knew what I was agreeing to. I only wish I had a bit more power in the whole thing, that’s all. Elven woman, and everything. Inquisitor. ”
“I know.” Cullen shook his head, his guilt black and choking. The wine on his tongue tasted thickly of bile all of a sudden. “We should be keeping you from this. Everyone will want to capitalise on your being Dalish, and a woman, cast you as some”—
She looked at him, eyes ice and narrow. “Don’t. I remember what they said.”
“I never meant for it.” Cullen had his body turned towards her now, and walked sideface, to keep a pace with her. “I should have done everything I could to diffuse that rumour, my lady. I see that now, to a painful degree. It was intolerable.”
“Don’t worry yourself, Commander; it happened. Nothing too terrible came of it, thankfully.”
“The rumours spread, to”—
“I know. But Josephine tempered them quite well.” Ellana rolled her shoulders around, stretching her neck as well. She was wine-loose, but troubled still. He could see how she carried it, in the little dent in her forehead and the tight small of her back.
Seduced with blood magic. He shook his head at the memory. It made him too angry, too guilty. A blood thrall to a Dalish savage. That’s what they said about me. I should’ve just told the truth.
“I think I’m for bed,” she said at last when they ended the corridor, in a voice that seemed wilting. Her shining eyes fell away from his face, and she stared somewhere to the side for a moment with a faraway look before turning away to go. She did not wait for his ‘goodnight’.
Cullen thought again about her snow-heart, and who had trampled it. His feet felt so cold.
--
Leliana set her pawn into place with a keen ‘click’. She raised her grey eyes to him expectantly.
“I believe it is your move now, Commander.” Cullen always found her accent to be so uniquely strange, even among the throng of Orlesian twangs he’d heard over the past year. It was not an unpretty accent, to be sure; but it seemed distinctive in its softness, its singsong quality. Less obnoxious, obtrusive. It suited her work and her nature exceedingly.
Cullen rubbed his temple before rising in his seat to inspect her move. Arranging a fortress. Nothing too cutthroat, for the moment.
As he made to move his rook forward, Leliana said loftily, “So. Your turbulent situation with the Lady Lavellan seems to have soothed itself, for the moment.”
Cullen winced. He had been hoping, in earnest, she would have the good graces not to bring such a topic to his attention now. But, he supposed, she was an opportunist; a true Orlesian. And by the Maker, how I wish she wouldn’t call her ‘Lady Lavellan’. She prefers ‘Inquisitor’, anyway, and the title of lady makes her sound so…Cullen frowned while he thought. Implacable? Untouchable? He didn’t like any of the words he was drumming up. He supposed that was Leliana’s intention, though; to speak of Ellana like something unattainable, something he was not allowed to put his hands on.
“Quite,” he managed. She extended a graceful arm to advance another pawn.
“And are you satisfied with that?”
Cullen shook his head at her. “Sister, don’t.”
“What’s that?” Leliana frowned petulantly. “Don’t what?”
“Press on answers you already have. Not with me.”
She leaned back in her seat, crossed her legs, neatly steepled her fingers over one knee. “I suppose you are right. I do already know how you feel for her, after all. I guess I merely hoped you had made progress.”
He worked his jaw angrily. Cullen regretted agreeing to meet alone with her at all. “Am I to understand this an impassable obstacle in my cooperation with the Inquisition? With you?”
Leliana’s eyes flashed conspiratorially. She cocked her head, just barely. “Perhaps. That depends somewhat on the Lady Lavellan, too. Her desires, while not…the most pertinent thing to our organisation, are still relevant. My duty is to ensure they are not destructive as well.”
He made a fist under the table. “I am destructive.”
“You know I did not mean it that way. Commander, I have deepest respect for your decision about abstaining from lyrium.”
Maker, even the word made him itch. “Then what is this about?”
“Ensuring that the past does not repeat itself. Or, need I remind you?”
He sighed, heavy as death. “No.”
“Good. I had thought not.” She nodded, prodding him to make a move. He acquiesced with a scowl, collecting one of her pawns with a knight. Her captured pieces still outweighed his by three or four, though, he noted with a glance at the little collection of tiny white statues she had assembled before her side of the board.
“Stop looking at me that way, Sister. Not when you’ve been exactly where I am before.”
“Oh?” She raised her eyebrows. It was startling, how fast her eyes could cool to ice.
He shrugged, almost spitefully tactless. “You loved a Dalish girl who killed herself to save the world. Or am I wrong?”
The spymaster’s face fell. A hundred things moved over it. Cullen was almost shaken, looking at so much regret.
“No, you are not wrong about that.” Leliana straightened, closed her eyes for a moment, and when she met his look again, she was steel. “But you are wrong about Ellana.” She snatched his knight with a bishop, quick as a viper. “Your views directly oppose hers—ours. We seek reform for mages, the chantry. What do you seek?”
He swallowed. “I—order. Prosperity.”
“Such vague concepts, Commander.”
“Malleable, perhaps. I am still trying to see what that will look like, tailored to this Thedas of ours.”
“Does it matter?” Her mouth quirked. “You were right, about me empathising with you at this moment. I know the look of one who will do anything to have the love they crave. I was that way, once.” Her shoulders dropped. She had the appearance of one who had lost too many women they loved far too much.
He looked away, guilty. “I’m sorry, Sister. I did not know her. She…I only ever saw her, briefly.”
He thought her heard her sniff. But when he searched the spymaster’s face, there were no tears, no redness. Only a cool porcelain face, unknowable as any hard lacquered Orlesian masque. “Lyna was the best woman I ever knew. And I have known many great women, Commander.” Leliana looked at her hands. “Ellana falls somewhere high on that ladder, though.”
“I would never steer her from the Inquisition. You must know that.”
“Not intentionally, no. But what occurred between the two of you at Haven shook her deeply, for many months.”
Cullen’s eyes narrowed the smallest bit. “Exactly how much do you know about what transpired between the Inquisitor and I at Haven, Sister?”
She tucked a lock of strawberry hair behind a loping ear, expertly dainty and unassuming. It was ineffective with him, but in-character of her. “I will not divulge everything, to be courteous. But the servants told me what they found on the sheets. Though, I had assumed as much was true beforehand.”
He ground his teeth. “Leering over the sheets Ellana lost her maidenhead on? Is that requisite information-gathering, Sister Nightingale?” He hissed, becoming furious as he thought of her being privy to such intimate knowledge all along, shaking her head in the shadows.
Frowning, Leliana rose from her seat entirely. “I hate to abandon our game, Commander, but I believe our discourse has dried up.” Primly, she smoothed her tunic and lifted her chin. “Do think on what I’ve told you.”
He took a breath, shut his eyes. Cullen tried to think of Honnleath, silky-coated horses, the smell of new leather. Everything, somehow, became an incarnation of Lavellan, the black-ink and green-flame spokes of her Anchor swallowing the rest of his world.
He wished he did not remember that night at Haven as brightly as he did.
--
A good half-foot of Ellana’s dark hair is singed clean off by some agitated dragon in the Western Approach, and Josephine offers to cut the rest of it to match. It’s just below her shoulders, curling under her neat clavicle. He shuffles his legs together as she leans over the table, inspecting everywhere he’s meticulously pinned. Somehow, it’s something. She’s reading his work, looking at it, touching the markers he’s placed, and it’s something.
She gets ill for two days with the sweating sickness when it breaks out across Skyhold following a visit from Rivaini traders. (‘It was that livestock they brought, I just know it!’ Josephine had fretted.) Cullen evades the outbreak somehow, and capitalises on his health by pouring his spare moments into nursing Ellana. The servants of Skyhold are too nervous to go near her, and she refuses their help anyway, so he assumes her care with secret glee.
Though Solas assures him Ellana will be in perfect health in a matter of days, Cullen cannot help but worry over her small, shivering body. Her skin is clammy and shining with sweat, and her eyes flutter weakly when he says her name.
“Commander,” she says feebly. “G-get out.”
He laughs softly. “Not a chance of that, I’m afraid. You’re the tenth to try to dissuade me, and my resolve has grown more solid with each attempt.”
She smiles faintly at his jape. “Cheeky shem,” she whispers. He grins, delighted to be alone with her at last, delighted by her wit, and wets a cloth to begin cooling her face.
--
After Leliana set off to Val Royeaux to speak about the position of Divine, much of Skyhold followed her for the time being, and the fortress descended into a rare period of quiet. Cullen sought Ellana during this time against his better judgment and, sometimes, seemingly, his will.
The first night of the spymaster’s absence, he found the Inquisitor swaddled in a Fereldan quilt, neck craned over a heavy tome, seated alone in the ancient, cobweb-shadowed library. Her right hand, wrapped in cloth bandage to bind her Anchor, hovered over the tiny print to guide her as she mouthed difficult words by candlelight. She looked like a curious apprentice in a Circle tower; Cullen’s past sighed at the sight of it.
Noticing him, she invited him to sit with her while she read, if he liked. He obliged her, all too pleased by the invitation, if only to smell the air near her, to hear what she might have to say in her pealing, loping, Dalish way. It was not why he felt what he did for her, but Cullen would be lying before the Maker if he did not admit that her strange, alien way of looking at the world intrigued him.
“What is that?” He nodded at the book.
She shrugged daintily. He remembered, with a start, how light she was; how easy it had been to lift her, to move her legs how he liked. He started at the memory, a little guiltily. Unaware, she answered him, “Nevarran lineage politics. Dense.” At his quizzical look, she offered, “For Josephine. A favour.”
“Any luck with it?”
Ellana shook her head. “It may as well be in a foreign tongue. The…dynastic nature of all this is quite new to me.”
“Oh? Any roadblocks?”
“The language is all so unfamiliar. Teyrns and barons and marquises all bleed together.” Again she shook her head, her fresh-cut locks whispering against the quilt she was wrapped in while she did. “And in Orlais and Nevarra, it’s worse still. I can’t remember even a handful of their titles. I didn’t think there could be such a thing as subdukes, before. Shemlen culture is strange indeed.”
He laughed, genuinely. “Yes, it certainly is. We all like to feel a little too important.”
She began to watch him. “Is that what you’re doing here? Trying to feel important?”
He straightened in his seat. He knew what she wanted him to do—balk, like she expected. Like someone weaker would. But Cullen knew Lavellan’s neat, arcing way of slicing into the meat of arguments intimately by now. He was not so easily barked off. “A little. Maybe. To you.”
She looked him up and down. “To me?”
He kept his look level. He wanted to be even with her; it wasn’t easy to do. “Don’t act shocked.”
She afforded him a little smile for his boldness. It was something she said she liked, once. Back at Haven. Something about how shems were so strong-willed, sometimes to a degree she found funnily obnoxious; her kin were never so, she’d said.
Her eyes swept the room before falling on him. He looked at her, hard, a little hungry. He wanted to keep her eyes on him, to feed her his emotions in that wordless way she did to him.
“I suppose I imagined it was possible you had grown past the events at Haven.”
“Have you?”
She shrugged with an innocence that was deliberately insincere. “I am just a girl, Commander, and know so little of the ways of men.”
He snorted. She smacked him on the thigh, where there was no dense, cold metal to defend him. Her hands were small, and their force quick and painless, but he quit laughing anyway.
“What?…I mean, I suppose it’s still sort of true.”
She huffed. Her mood dampened the moment her eyes returned to her book. “To return to my original problem, however…I suppose this sort of thing will always be a bit above me.”
He frowned. “No, that’s not true. You were magnificent at Halamshiral.” When her face brightened, he continued. “Yes, Your Worship, the whole court was taken with you. Didn’t you see Josephine beaming at your progress the entire time?”
“I felt a bit silly, in military costume among all those people. All that finery.” She drew the quilt closer; the fingers of her right hand curled around her bandaged Anchor. “I was suspicious of everyone who spoke to me. They were all so eager to make me out to be something awful.”
“That’s Orlesians, I’m afraid.”
“Not Sister Leliana. She is trustworthy.”
He winced, thinking of their chess game. With you, perhaps, Lavellan. “Sister Nightingale…is indispensable to those whom she chooses to serve. But quite fatal otherwise.”
She hummed in support. “Yes, that’s true. I guess I’m very lucky she finds working with me advantageous.”
“It’s more than that. She cares for you.” He remembered her grey eyes, cold, flashing at him while she asked him to forget his night with Ellana. “She…admires you. She wants to see you in power, I imagine.”
She shifted in her seat, touching her Anchor again, fretting. “I’m not certain I want any power after this. After what happened with my clan…” he opened his mouth to offer solace, some comfort maybe, but she simply resumed, saying, “No, Commander, it’s quite all right. Months have passed, and…I understand nothing could be done.” Her gaze was still so tired and so sad. “I just…don’t think I desire stone corridors for myself after this business with the Venatori is finished. If I cannot be Keeper, why lead anyone?” She looked away. “Being Keeper is what I was born for.”
He dragged his chair a beat closer to her. “Being a templar is all there used to be to me. Nothing underneath. Not before the end of Kirkwall. And the start of all this.”
“But I have nothing to go back to,” she said softly. Her eyes, dark and huge, studied him like a deer’s, gauging something for hostile behaviour.
He shrugged. “Neither do I. I suppose this whole thing may have to stick around, for at least a little while after.” He snorted. “Won’t that ruffle feathers in Orlais?”
She groaned, burying her face in her little arms and dark hair. “I’ve ruffled plenty of feathers for one lifetime, thanks.”
He laughed at her childishness, easy as air. “If they could see you—you look”—he put a gloved hand to his mouth to stifle laughter, his boyish impropriety—“like a—like a child, frightened by a storm.”
“Oh, shove off, shem!” Ellana kicked at him under the table. He kept laughing, feeling young, feeling like he only did when he was alone with her.
The echoing, foreboding sound of clacking heels silenced them like a clean knife. From behind marble pillars dyed peach from candlelight, Vivienne appeared, dressed in something pale and chiffon that ballooned in places both strange and alluring.
“Ah,” she said, low and blatantly displeased. “I had not meant to…” her dark eyes fell on Cullen, “interrupt. Finding the evening devoid of work, Commander?”
Familiar with her political disdain for his relationship with Lavellan, he forced a courteous smile. His presence, she often attested, confused the Inquisitor about the ‘mage problem’. “Most slow, actually. In Sister Leliana’s absence, I find far fewer problems reaching my desk.”
She cocked her dark, exquisite face to the side. “Yes. Quite.”
“Commander Cullen is helping me to understand the finer points of Nevarran lineage,” Ellana supplied helpfully. It was a thin veneer at best, but one Vivienne would be forced to accept; her staunch support of Ellana’s power and position made her keen to defend the girl, even when she did not believe or agree with her.
“Ah. I see. Best keep at it, then.” Affronted, Vivienne turned elegantly on heel and left with a high, “Hmp.” Her footsteps followed her, stark as heavy rain on a roof. The huge oak doors of the library closed behind here with a yawning creak.
Cullen gently pinched a place above one temple. “She hates me, that one.”
Ellana sighed, unable to produce a convincing lie to refute him. “Is there no one who doesn’t know? Sometimes it seems not. And must they all have opinions, too?”
He searched her face. She seemed so earnest. “Inquisitor”—the title still felt so heavy in his mouth at that moment, so stale—“ours was a most—unnerving match.”
She raised her eyebrows, probably due to his language. He regretted his awkward, Fereldan use of the word ‘match’. “Oh?”
He swallowed. “I, well. Surely you’ve noticed?”
“A man once lined up to be Knight Commander, and me, an elven mage once meant to be Keeper. Yes, I see how it’s queer.” Her gaze met him, a little snarl of challenge in it. “But we are neither of us those things any longer. And none of these people have business to ask things of me, or speak of me. Not like that.”
“If only they would acquiesce.” Cullen sighed. He looked at her, full of guilt again, swollen with it like a wet rag. “Your Worship, I’m sorry I instigated all this.”
Her brow tightened. “Is that what you think?”
He leaned in, closing them off to anyone who may choose to peek in, like Vivienne had. “I care what you think.”
She worried her lip with her teeth. “I’m not certain, these days.”
“All right. Start backwards.” He inched closer in his seat. “What did you think of it back then? In Haven?”
Her eyes were dark mirrors, showing him so little but his own reflection. “I…did not think it through very thoroughly, I admit.” She drew her quilt ever-closer, nervously. “I just…saw you.” She shrugged gently. “I don’t know. I just saw you.”
He did know, oddly enough. It was an intangible thing, what lay between them; some dense, untouchable fog that rolled in when she was close, blurring his vision, narrowing his goals. It had been like that since the early days of the Inquisition. Not straightaway; but sometime after she brought Master Dennet back with her, smile young and sideways as she strode into camp. Sometime after that, he thought, the fog came.
His jaw worked, tight as a drum. His temple was taut against the skin. It was so hard to exploit his wit around her. “I am so sorry I didn’t tell the truth, Ellana.”
Her sharp little ears perked, so endearingly like a dog’s, when he said her name. He was again embarrassed by how much he liked how…elven she was. He continued, “I was ashamed, to be truthful with you. I…had only just left the order, left my oath behind to take up the Inquisition’s.” He swallowed. “When they taunted me and hated me for taking to you, a mage, a Dalish apostate of all things, I felt weak. They all said it was proof I had abandoned the Order forever, and I was ashamed.”
Her fingers twitched, but she didn’t move. She watched him, waiting to wring a full confession. Ellana Lavellan was kind, but not always very soft. He supposed he didn’t much deserve her softness at the moment.
He pursued in a rush, “But I shouldn’t have been. I should have quieted those, those rumours of blood magic”—the idea alone brought up pictures dark and twisting and gnawing, so he barrelled along—“the moment they sprang up, and I should have told them all I loved you. Truly.” When he finished, he was a bit out of breath.
The fingers of her right hand curled over her lips, slow and tentative. She smiled, just a bit. All the beautiful Dalish pictures inked onto the planes of her face brightened. “No, you… shouldn’t have. That would have been excessive, and Josephine would have rioted at the scandal.”
He laughed, quieted and relieved by her levity. He hadn’t expected her to return his confession at once; she was what Varric Tethras once called ‘a gambling type’. He had described her as such just before Halamshiral: nah, don’t worry about Inks, Ruffles. (‘Inks’, Varric said when he coined it, on account of her vallaslin, and, ‘hey, she’s the Inquisitor. Get it?’) She’ll be fiiine. He’d chucked Ellana’s shoulder fondly. Look at her. Like a statue! She’s a gambling type. Never shows her cards.
“I suppose you’re right again.” He brushed a short, loose bit of hair from his brow. “But what would you have of me, Your Worship?” He was prone to the title now; it spoke to something in him, something like his boyhood passion for the incredible pictures he saw inside the old chantries, only this hummed and rotated around Lavellan; exquisite, lithe, clever-mouthed, heady-voiced, quick-eyed Lavellan. (He imagined toiling inside ruined shrines, finding coloured bits of glass in piles of ancient rubble to make mosaics of her fine face, in some other life where some version of him told love with art instead of steel.) She never objected to him using the title; she didn’t seem to mind it. It seemed to please her, to have a man much larger, and older, and more Fereldan calling her his ‘Worship’.
Ellana let the quilt fall to her waist, showing him her shoulders like a gift. He watched her, reverent as an incense-bearer, an acolyte with awed eyes.
“You came to me tonight because Sister Leliana is absent, and you wanted us to be alone.” Slice, slice. She did it so neatly, every time.
Under her stare, he had no wits to spare for a cheeky rebuttal. He was armed with only the truth, only himself. I hope, this time, it is enough. “Yes.”
She leaned her face towards him, just a little. “You have been planning to speak with me for some time. Probably rehearsed some of this.”
“Some of it, yes.” His swallow was dry. “Most of it went off-script.”
That earned him a twitching smile. “Do you have a plan?”
“I’m baptised in the chantry.” His answer was rapid; this, he had thought through before. “I served as Knight Captain of a state in the Free Marches for ten years, four years in the Fereldan Circle before that. I was set to be Knight Commander before I joined your ranks.”
“So?”
“So, I legitimise you.”
“Me, or the Inquisition?”
“Both. The Inquisition does and always shall have my support. But a public relationship with me could quiet those who brand you a Dalish heretic.”
“Or be seen as confirmation that their raving is correct, and my heresy is infecting good Andrastian men.” Her counter arguments were so quick, so clean. She had been sparring with Leliana, it seemed. He heard them sometimes, practising Ellana’s Orlesian in the courtyard.
“Not if my faith is publically stalwart, and you are still an Andrastian for all intents and purposes.”
Ellana leaned back, seeming to think it over. He knew she was not devout about the Dalish gods, but he also knew she thought little of Andrastianism and subscribed to a more self-taught, spirit-based faith. He himself couldn’t bow with absolute integrity before the Maker’s image most days; he had seen so much death and such little to answer to it, save the efforts of largely those the chantry would call heretics.
“Cullen, my vallaslin will never scrub off.”
“So hide it behind a shiny red sword.”
She giggled. When he reached for her little white hand, she let him take it gently. Cullen ran his thumbs over the backs of them, trying to feel their dimples beneath his leather gloves. He was frightened of taking them off to touch her; he feared his poor restraint, her lyrium-spicy, static skin.
He wondered now, sometimes, if Tevinter was right, and Andraste had been a mage. Sometimes when he closed his eyes, he imagined her, calling up flashing storms, sewing the heavens together or apart with her fingers like Ellana did.
“It’s…been over half a year,” she murmured. Her lashes kissed the tops of her cheeks before she peered up. “Why have you not moved past it?”
He answered honestly and easily, because he knew Ellana, and knew that there was no veiled game in her question. “Because, I’ve been lonely for so long I had begun to think it was just a part of the world, or my personality. And now that I’ve been unlonely, I can’t picture going back.”
She chuckled nervously. “Before I left, a girl from my clan, Lavina, she said that shemlen men would try to marry me and convince me to birth their shemlen litters.” Ellana cracked a smile that was all nervousness underneath, all barely-hid anxiety. “That’s not what you’re doing, is it?”
“No.” Without shame or hesitation, he slid from his chair and began to descend to his knees, still gripping her hands. “This is not about me. I have very little to lose.”
“I do.” Her face held a challenge again. “I’m spoken about all over Thedas already. We both know it was a blow to your reputation to be found with a mage, but what of my legitimacy? What of the precedent it’s set for me, and my kind, and my alliance with Fiona? To sleep with a templar?”
He winced. No, I hadn’t particularly thought of it much. He’d never really imagined himself as the controversy; but he supposed, from the eyes of a once-Dalish once-virgin still-mage, and one in Ellana’s position, it might not put one in the best light.
“You must know I would never put my old oaths, or my private feelings, before mine to you. Never.”
His fervour seemed to surprise her; ease her a little, too. “Truly?”
“If discretion is your wish, you will have it.” He kissed her knuckles. Magic hummed under her skin, singing to his lyrium-dry bones. Like a penitent knight from a story, he bent his head over her clasped hands. “I remain yours.”
She kissed his hair and held herself there for a moment, to breathe the smell of it.
--
In the queer, tribal politics of Ellana’s world, speaking of something explicitly was as good as affirming it. Now that he had confronted her without being rebuffed, she had given him permission to love her. This was how he understood it.
She appeared in his chamber one evening, saddle-ripe and dashed with hour-old cuts. He’d been amused at first, chuckling about finding her a bath or a bed, but she shoved his proffered arms and sweetness aside and kissed him like he was prey.
Cullen’s arse hit his desk and he went to her waist at once, grabbing, lifting, yanking things down and off and aside and pulling her up. Her legs curled round his torso like the toothed lips of a flytrap, closing elegantly and fatally.
She couldn’t reach much with his armour on, but she yanked his collar down to bite at his pulse like some ravenous fox, making him shudder and shake. He didn’t care that someone might see it the mark she made if he turned his head at the wrong angle; it was of far lesser concern than she was. Everything is of far lesser concern.
She complained quietly of her sweat when he tried to work his hand to her cunt, but he bit her lip, made her cry out and pressed inside anyway, curling and soothing and making her pretty mouth sigh and her pretty eyes flutter. A long time ago, with the small troupe of other women he had been with, he had once been a very gentle lover, all careful touches and discipline. With Ellana, he found himself begging roughly, desperately for permissions, attacking her with fervour when she gave him little sighs of ‘yes’. They fell into each other like a man and woman starved, all claws and pleads, and he ran his mouth over every part of her she allowed, kissing the metallic scent of lyrium off her skin. He felt like a man possessed. He remembered his brothers in the Fereldan Circle, the ones who fell to the demons who looked like beautiful wives with warm arms and soft eyes. He wondered if he might have fallen, too, if the demon who wanted him had looked and tasted and sounded like Ellana.
She climbed on top of him, naked except a little Dalish cord round her neck and the canvas and skin boots she wore, and splayed one hand on his pauldroned shoulder. The other she used to touch him where he had grown large and throbbing for her, to unlace him from his fine crimson breeches and lower herself onto him. Somehow, he felt the lesser one, being mounted upon his desk by a wild Dalish girl whose cheeks were freckled with dirt. She put her teeth to the shell of his ear, let him make a tight fist in her hair while he closed his eyes over her, this feeling he had wanted to feel so badly again, hot silk and moving earth, as she began to rise and fall.
He put his hands to her waist and gripped like he was drowning. Helped rock her up and down. Let her bite him, hard, knowing the mark it made would raise questions, liking it too much to ask her to stop. Moaned, pleaded without restraint. Like a man possessed.
--
He never came to her. He waited, patient and anxious in equal measure, for word from her. Always.
He didn’t want to drive her away by making her think he thought he could control her. He was honestly terrified of doing anything to drive her away. Being with her made his heart feel cleaner and younger than any amount of fasting and prayer ever had. Sometimes, Josephine said, he sounded a bit too serious when he called her ‘Your Worship’. You sound as if you actually worship her at times, Knight Captain!
He was not so certain she was wrong.
Too often he thought of Andraste, only a human with such grand ideas, far too in love with someone far greater than she, someone she could never truly touch. It worried him.
She snuck into his chamber whenever she pleased, and he never objected. Nine times out of ten, she could only spares a few minutes to slip within and curl inside his arms, closing her eyes like a cat, or listen to him read from the Canticles with a charmed, thoughtful expression, or have a cup of wine with him and let him kiss her against the wall until she peeled away, laughing, begging off to go be important elsewhere and leaving him, panting and burning for her with one arm propping him up.
One time out of every ten, she stayed. She always came to him hungry, brusque about something, frustrated about something else, and always, always missing him. Her explanations were brief—I’ve distracted the others with Dagna, or they’ve gone to talk to an envoy—before leaping onto him. She quite liked when he left his armour on, he noticed, perhaps admiring something about the symbol of it, but when she caught him with it off, she spared his flesh nothing. His inner thighs were dotted with the reddening places she had nibbled and nursed, his back raked by her little nails. When he took her from behind, he gave her his knuckles to bite down into, appreciating as her teeth sank into his hand with every squeal she produced and every swift thrust he made. A part of him badly wanted scars from her, evidence of their affair cut into his flesh like a story, like the ancient memories carefully inked onto her cheeks and brow.
One evening, after enduring trade talks with Josephine and a dozen Antivan merchant councillors for half a day, she found him in his chamber, asked him to lock his doors and turn everyone away for a time, and she had the silver-silk gown their ambassador had had made for her pooling round her ankles before he even put his hands on her.
He begged to be allowed to put his mouth on her; she was young and new to such things, and had always denied him before out of embarrassment, but this time Ellana nodded shyly, but eagerly, and braced herself in his chair while he eased her naked legs apart.
Cullen sank to his knees and put his mouth to her like tender prayer. When he kissed her there, deep, it was with reverence. His tongue swept the length of her, making her keen and squirm, and the warm, salty, mortal flavour of her made him marvel, made him hard.
She pulled his hair impatiently, gasping wild little pleas, thrashing, twisting her fingers in the locks. She was fond of his hair, he’d noticed cockily.
He held her in place, seizing her high little hips with gauntleted fingers, caring very little about the constellation of proof his roughness would leave on her skin. No one should see, he thought, feeling half-mad, and free. If they do, for any wild reason, let them know what it means. Let them know that she let me have her.
Her pelvis stilled in compliance with his force, but her legs entrapped him, her small, bare feet occasionally kicking back against his metallic spine impermissibly when he did something that made her back arch. He could not involve his fingers in his prayer, sharp and armoured as they were, so he used them as props to play up the roughness of it all by gripping her ever-harder, making her yelp and smile around a gasp. She liked it. He liked it.
His cold hands ventured to her round little arse as he turned his face to get a better angle at her. He was greedy; but she acquiesced fabulously, getting wetter as he worked, keeping him satisfied.
Without meaning to, she flailed one dangling heel against his pauldroned shoulder. She cooed like a bird, easing ever more into his clawed grasp, his passionate mouth.
He paused, moving just a bit to speak, keeping his lips hovering over where she was warmest, letting his breath excite her. “Your Worship,” he said, feeling weak as a thrall, torn open by his feeble lust as though flayed by it, “you’re beautiful. Maker.” He kissed her there again, gluttonous for her pretty, startled sounds, wanting her to say his name again, that way she was sighing it earlier like she couldn’t help herself. “You’re so beautiful. Fuck the Maker.” He capped off his blasphemous swear by sucking on the excited little hooded ball that reddened so enticingly at the top of her dark-curled cunt. He closed his eyes and moaned himself while his cheeks hollowed, soaking in her noisome, desperate, throaty cries, thinking of the hardness between his legs that twitched with hunger and blood at every new pitch her breath took.
Her hips began to shudder and struggle; her fingers spasmed in his hair. Her breath took on a whole new fast, high quality that he liked very much.
“Cullen—oh! Creators, please, please, please!” she cried out, screwing her eyes shut so her lashes kissed her cheeks, begging open-mouthed, clamping her legs around his head.
He raised his head, making her produce a noise that was half-choke and half-sob.
“I need your permission, Worship,” he told her, low and hoarse. Her eyes were dizzying as she looked at him, flush from pleasure, absolutely baffled.
“I—w-what?” She squeaked.
“Give me”—he lay a lazy, arduous kiss on her knee—“your express permissions”—he dotted a place near her thigh with his tongue—“to make you come”—and here he at last looked at her, heavy and challenging, “with my tongue.”
He fought a smug smirk at her astonishment. He was pleased to have finally outmatched her; for the first time, he truly felt like a seasoned man, sleeping with a young and wide-eyed woman. Normally, Ellana’s energy and savagery compensated for her youth. On the fronts of shemlen ‘boldness’, however, he seemed to have her beaten.
Her desperation trampled her pride. Raspy and pealing, she begged, “Yes, please! You have it, please, lethallin!” Her hair fell over her shoulders as she threw her head back, and, as he appreciated the sight of one particularly long dark curl swaying near a nipple, he bent to resume his work and please his Worship.
Working his tongue deep inside her, he mimicked sex with a precision he was meticulously conscious of. He thought, distantly, through the fog, of the times he had disappointed her since their first meeting. The memory of it, though vague, made him feel something like anger teeming under the dark nature of his lust for her. Anger towards himself. He was driven by it, compelled to satisfy her permissions, to take advantage of it and make her see that she had chosen well to let him love her, though a shakily devout, sad-eyed, broken-souled and tactless human was he.
“Oh,” she went, rolling her hips into his face. He ran a cold, steel thumb over her faintly tattooed thighs. He had wondered with a lustful start, upon seeing her the first time, if her vallaslin went further than her face. He had discovered, over time, more and more little rings and dots and lines nestled between thighs and shoulders and elbows; he stared at them like some priest inspecting runes. Perhaps it was simply because he found them so strange, so unique to her, but he loved the careful images inked into her skin. He traced them gently and teasingly, imagining himself unlocking some spell on her by tracing them correctly, some elvhen magic that made her unknowable to him.
She began to buck eagerly; Cullen pulled away again, and she whined. It became a little gasp, though, when she heard his belt buckle drop to the floorboards.
“I can’t help myself,” he told her frankly as he undid his laces and moved to grip her by the hips. He lifted her onto his desk easily, putting his cock against her and letting it tease her while she sighed. “I’m very selfish with you, Your Worship,” he growled into her ear. “I want to be inside you when you come.”
He pushed into her as easy as breathing, finding her so slippery, so warm it made his head feel thick. “Fuck,” he said through his teeth. She breathed in sharply, digging her small fingernails into the tops of his arse. Cullen didn’t have the restraint to orchestrate anything building; he began to rut wildly into her straightaway, clawed fingers digging into her thighs, while he grunted curses and hoarse sweetness into the line of her jaw. Ellana cried out as if pierced, over and over, and lay her loose arms round his neck while she tipped her head back and shut her eyes. Cullen exploited her defenceless throat by worrying the column of it with his tongue and his teeth, wishing so hard that absolutely everything else would vanish apart from them. Fuck the Maker, he thought again, sinfully; gleefully.
He was sure that any number of people had heard the both of them by now; she was calling so sweetly for him, begging so sweetly for him, and Cullen couldn’t find it in himself to care all so much about who heard them and who didn’t. He knew she would, but he could not open his mouth to advise her to stop. A part of him, sickly, wanted them to know.
Her breasts bounced every time he rutted like cherry-tipped creams; he wanted to bite into one and suck.
“Cr-Creators,” Ellana gasped, a blush high in her cheeks. Her hair had begun to stick to her brow. “Oh-oh!”
He dove in to kiss her quick and hard, put her own taste on her lips. She blinked at him, licking her mouth tentatively, shy and puzzled. Growling, he began to pound harder, making his desk slam rebelliously on the stone.
“C-Cullen!” Fucking Maker, she makes it sound sweet. “You’re—you’re going so”—
“I know,” he said, hooking an arm under one of her legs and pulling it tautly over his shoulder to get deeper inside her. He looked her in the eye, loving how she shivered and quailed a little when he did. He had become far too aware of how much he liked it when she was naked and he wasn’t. It was one of the only times he felt on par with her, honestly. “You’ve made me this way,” Cullen told her, sliding into her, breathless when their hips touched.
“I…?” she started softly, eyes fluttering as he started again.
“Yes,” he panted, taking her silky hair in his metal fist, “you.” He sank his mouth onto her throat while he fucked her, his prophet, moaning and twisting so beautifully in his arms. Cullen felt baptised by her beading sweat; he kissed it off her, thirsty and worshipful. “I love you,” he said roughly, staring into her suddenly as he smacked their hips together, “too much.”
She grabbed hold of his shoulders, burying her face in his breastplate as his hips kept snapping and making her squeal. He closed his eyes, drunk off everything she made him feel. Being with Ellana was an assault of the heart, to be sure; she made so many things happen within him at once, and he couldn’t grab hold of a single one long enough to read it, to understand it. Instead, he fell rapidly through the vertical tunnels of her mystifying wit and customs, a happy slave to her inguessable whims. He did not trust himself to steer the pair of them; he was broken, used. Better to take knee and serve the woman he loves than despoil her with his own reputation, he thought. With his nightmares, and the periods where he itched so badly for lyrium that he could only stare into his fire, paralysed by the want.
And Lavellan, his prophet-in-flesh, came underneath him, mouth dark and gasping, belly quivering and face glowing with the most beautiful pleasure, saying desperately, “Oh—I love you, as well, I-I do!”
The sight of it enticed him so much he followed her almost at once, grabbing her hard and pumping into her like a crossbow once, twice, thrice. He said her name hoarse and low, an involuntary thing, and she cooed at him, pleased.
“Do you?” he asked, still panting, still exhausted. But he had to pursue. “Do you love me, Ellana?”
She smiled at him, serene as an open lily. His heart stuttered like a cough, so flawed and human by comparison. “Yes,” she said, simple and soft.
He rest his forehead to hers, sated at last. “Ah,” he gasped. “Good.”
She looked at him curiously. “Do I worry you, lethallin?”
Yes. “No.”
“I know I was remiss in not returning it earlier…but I have never before…I had not…”
“I know that. It’s fine.” He kissed her sweat-soft temple.
She looked into his eyes, one at a time. “Then why do you look at me like you are afraid I do not love you?”
He tensed. He was at one of the crossroads she invented for him, where he could lie or not lie. He thought on his already-committed sins, and his likelihood in successfully lying to her anyway, and opted for the truth.
“Because I often fear I am far from adequate enough for you.” He nearly winced at his characteristic stale, colourless delivery of his feelings.
“Why?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Please, love. Please don’t make me speak of this now.”
She sucked her lip when he called her ‘love’ and did not ask anything further. He looked at her, wondering how she got to be this way, wondering how she became exactly the girl-shaped force that would unravel everything he had carefully bricked together about himself. Could it be an accident? Could she have blown into him simply by coincidence? He doubted it. Cullen couldn’t shake the notion that some providence had put him in her way, but he didn’t think he could believe it was the Maker. The Maker, reputedly, hated Dalish elves; Cullen could not reconcile that angry, vicious god with the nimble woman who had grown weeds in his mind. That god certainly would not have characteristically chosen her for his Herald; and if not the Maker, then who?
She began pulling her smallclothes back on, stirring him a bit with the way she stretched and bent to do it. He loved her stomach; it was so sinewy and pale, so often hidden by heavy robes. He watched it like a crow.
“No? Not enough of a show earlier?” she asked mirthfully. He laced himself up while he watched her, groping for his belt for a moment.
“No,” he answered levelly, not quite humorous. “I’m afraid I’m difficult to satiate, with you.”
“The appetites of templars,” she said mildly, tsk-tsking him with a wry smirk. Though just spent, his cock twitched vaguely, anyway.
He swallowed, feeling stripped the way he did whenever they had finished a tryst. “Will you return soon?”
She peered at him over her shoulder. “As soon as I may,” she promised quietly.
He crossed the room to kiss her after she pulled on her dress. “I’ll wait,” he swore under his breath.
She leaned into his cheek, sighing like she wanted to fall asleep there. “So long as you’re here, I’ll always come.”
He touched the back of her neck tenderly, wanting to take her up the ladder, to properly take her to bed and slumber with her brow to his cheek like this. He wanted the power to reel her back from all the demands on her, to truly kiss away the frowns in her brow. He wanted…much, much more than a man of the Order was bred to even dream of.
He kissed her hard. There was so much stitched into him now, so much of the seam of him trimmed with her; he kissed her roughly to tell her of it, as he had no other way in which he excelled at doing so. He bit gently on her already-swollen lips, and she pulled away with a shocked little start. Cullen smiled.
“Don’t tarry,” he said tenderly.
She backed towards the door. “Won’t,” she fired back, pulling it open and fleeing into the black. It swung behind her with a large, imposing noise. He fell back against his desk, deflated, exhausted, full of half-starved dreams.
No one ever warned him against loving his prophets too much.