Chapter Text
They say that the witches of the Korcari Wilds steal babes from the cradle and leave their mothers to mourn a child still living, but Seluna Tabris has never been one to believe in idle fairytales. She will come to regret this decision.
*
It began the night before Summerday. They’d been expecting Valora in the morning, but she and Nelaros had been far earlier than anyone expected. Of course, early evening was too late to begin the wedding preparations, but plenty of time for the festival atmosphere to spread from their small house to the whole of the alienage. Soris was unhappy, of course, but Soris had made up his mind to be disappointed from the moment their betrothals were announced, and if Valora had been as beautiful as the sunrise, he still would have found something to be dissatisfied with. As it was, she was shy, and he was sullen, and while Luna loved her cousin, she could not bring herself to rescue him when more pleasant diversions were on offer – diversions like Nelaros.
He was handsome, of course, with his golden hair and vhenandal green eyes, but that wasn’t what had enchanted her so quickly. No, it was how he’d looked at her as they’d been introduced – the way his eyes had widened, and a blush had crept into the tips of his ears. The way he’d taken her hand in his own, as though he’d been handed something impossibly precious, and said, with the sincerity of a hero of romance: “I’ll spend every waking moment learning to make you happy.”
The way those hands – strong hands, smith’s hands – had settled on her waist as they danced, and later, with some coaxing, her hips, lifting her into the air as the music grew wilder and the air grew heavy with the scent of evening blossom and cheap honeywine. The way they’d flexed once, nervous, then tightened on her as she’d pulled him, giggling, into an alley, and kissed him long and fierce and hungry.
He wasn’t her first, of course, but nobody before had touched her the way he had. Alienage girls weren’t precious, delicate flowers, but to Nelaros- to Nelaros she might have been some great lady out of the stories of Arlathan, some goddess or nymph bestowing one night of her company on a mortal man and driving him half-mad with desire for something impossible. Reflected in his eyes, the torchlight burning in her pale hair, she might even have been Andraste come again, and the very thought of it – heretical, impossible – somehow made desire burn hotter in her belly.
It was the night before their wedding, after all. Even the chastest Chantry sister could barely call what they did a sin, though of course she’d kissed him goodnight and chased him, giggling, from her bedroom before midnight, and laughed harder at Shianni’s knowing smile.
“You couldn’t wait one more night?” she had teased, perching behind her to pull a comb through her tousled curls. “You’re insatiable. That poor boy doesn’t know what he’s in for.”
“Nothing wrong with getting a little practice in before the big day,” Luna had retorted, and yelped when Shianni tugged her hair reprovingly. “Besides, Father’s going to be pestering me for grandchildren as soon as the band’s on my finger, we might as well get started. The house is going to be too quiet when Soris and Valora move out.”
It hadn’t felt real, then, but she’d imagined it all the same – fair-haired, grubby, noisy children of her own, chasing their own cousins through the houses and alleys, filling the alienage with laughter that had not yet learned loss, that could see her home as the safe harbour she’d once believed it to be. The safe harbour she would make it, with a knife at her belt and her husband and cousins around her.
She reached for the familiar knife-hilt the next day, when the Arl’s son threw Shianni to the ground, and found only the soft silk of her wedding gown. Her mother’s dress, soft and lovely and precious and useless. It had felt like a lucky charm when she’d slipped into it, but it could not protect her, any more than it had protected Adaia. Any more than it would protect the children she’d dreamt of, the children she’d never have, when the shemlen cut Nelaros down before her eyes. She’d known him less than a day. It still felt like they’d cut away a part of her as she watched him fall, as she gathered him into her lap and felt his blood soak through her hands, through her skirts, onto the lovely, useless dress she’d meant to marry him in.
“No,” she’d said, a hopeless, useless prayer to a Maker who was not listening, who had never listened to the prayers of girls like her. “Stay with me, please.”
She was a child again, at her mother's bedside, clinging to her burned and bandaged hand, heedless of the pain she caused in her desperation. Please, please stay. But Adaia had not stayed, and neither did Nelaros. He only gazed up at her with those wide green eyes, as if he’d never seen anything so lovely, and faded away beneath her fingers, taking her sweet, imagined future with him.
Everything seemed dulled, after that sharp, cauterising agony. She’d never killed anyone before the Arl’s son took her, and vengeance was meant to be sweet, but she could not taste it. It had not saved Nola, or Shianni, or Nelaros. It had not saved her. Even the sting of Elva’s betrayal was a distant, hollow thing – what did it matter now if the shemlen chose to hang her, if her own had handed her over to them? Her husband lay still and cold in the Arl of Denerim’s villa, and her future lay dead with him. She wondered, distantly, if they’d even be allowed to recover his body. If she’d be allowed to wear widow’s weeds to the gallows, or if they’d hang her in her wedding gown, the Butcher Bride of Denerim.
It was, strangely, her salvation that roused her from her numbed state, and she felt, within her, a tiger’s rage, even as Valendrian’s shem friend looked at her as if she was a kitten.
“You can’t just take me!” she choked out, as the hahren seized her arm as if she was half-wild or out of her mind. She might have been. “Save him! Save Soris!”
Soris who still had Valora. Soris who was her little cousin, who could still be happy-
But the human was shaking his head sorrowfully, as if this wasn’t his fault, and she wanted to shake him – all that shining armour and those two great swords and he’d sent Soris and Nelaros to their deaths to save her, when she was already dead-
“It takes strength, to become a Grey Warden, a strength I did not see in your cousin,” he said, as if he knew either of them, as if he knew anything about strength beyond what it took to swing a blade, to kill a darkspawn. “You, though- there is a fire in you, a fire that belonged to your mother. You may survive it, for a time.”
She’d spat at his feet then, called him every curse she could think of, snarled and raged and lashed out like a wounded animal. And he’d stood there, implacable as stone, with that expression of calm, immovable sorrow on his face. As if he’d had no other choice than to do nothing.
If it hadn’t been for Alistair, she’d have laughed, when she heard how he met his end. Betrayed by Loghain, then stabbed in the back. It had been better than he deserved.
The girl she had been before her wedding, the merry, mischievous maid always quick to flirt or to fight, would have been horrified by such a thought about a man who’d tried to save her, who’d tried, in his own way, to be kind. But the woman she was now had no space for such horror. She was bitter, barren ground, and only hateful emotions could take root in her now. All sweetness had died with the version of her who might have been a wife, a mother, the defender and hahren of the alienage. It was, perhaps, no wonder that she’d survived her Joining – of course the foulness of the Blight would find rich food in her seething, broken heart.
She could not quite bring herself to hate Alistair, though, despite his naivety and his pathetic grief for Duncan. He spoke of the dead man as if he’d lost a beloved father, as if he had not dragged Seluna away from her own father’s arms, and though his words disgusted her, his grief- his grief she knew well. Her own grief had left her hollowed-out, but his had left him rudderless, as dependent on her as her orphaned cousins had ever been. More fool him. She had not been able to save them, but she could not quite bring herself to abandon him either. He reminded her too much of Soris, of the bold, brash, self-involved little cousin she had failed to save.
Morrigan though... the Witch of the Wilds was like nobody she’d ever met, ruthless and independent and remorseless in her selfishness. There were ruthless people in the alienage, of course, and selfish ones everywhere, but they were feral dogs to Morrigan’s wild wolf – they'd turned on a society that had beaten them too many times, and to Luna, at least, the alienage had been a place of small, fragile kindnesses, because nobody would care for them if they did not care for one another. But to hear Morrigan talk, nobody had ever done her a kindness, and if the world had been cruel to her, it was the impassive cruelty of nature. A wolf was not cruel for snatching a lamb from its mother, any more than the wind was cruel when it bit through the thin canvas of Luna’s flimsy tent and left her shivering, longing for the warmth of Shianni’s back tucked against her belly, or Nelaros’ hands- no. She could not think of Nelaros. She had hardly known him long enough or well enough to mourn him as she did, let alone to love him, and yet-
And yet she mourned him still, in those chill, lonely hours of the night, or at least, the life she’d briefly imagined for them. The life where she still lived in her father’s house, with a husband who kept her knives sharp and kissed every scar on her hands, with golden-haired, giggling children- but his face was already shadowed in her memory, and she could no longer imagine what those children might have been like. Grey Wardens did not have homes, or families. She would never hold her own child in her arms, and hum the songs she could distantly recall her own mother singing.
If she’d still been in her father’s house, she would have laid her head in his lap, cried into Shianni’s shoulder, or drowned her sorrows behind Alarith’s shop with Soris, but their flight from Ostagar left little time for such indulgence, and even if it had, her companions were not her cousins. For all Alistair reminded her of Soris, he could not see beyond his own grief to attempt to assuage hers, and as for Morrigan, she’d sooner expect the bear she sometimes resembled to offer her a cuddle than the woman herself to offer something as frivolous as a kind word.
Perhaps it was for the best she had no temptation to go looking for sympathy, though. She was already the weak link in their group, lacking Templar training or wild magic to aid her in a fight, and since the Joining, her body had become a foreign country. She’d always prided herself on her quickness, her strength, but the daily forced marches drove her to whey-faced exhaustion, and she found herself flagging behind the others too often on the road. She hadn’t yet tripped over her own feet in a fight, but it felt like only a matter of time. Surely she hadn’t been that much of a spoilt city girl? But Morrigan’s expression told her otherwise, and for all his clearly noble upbringing, Alistair had spent far more time sleeping on the ground than Luna ever had. Every bone in her body ached from waking to sleeping, and she’d have taken Shianni’s snoring a hundred times over waking cold, alone, and somehow still bone-tired.
Still, her mother had used to remind her that she could get used to anything if she put her mind to it. By the time they reached Lothering, her life before Ostagar had already begun to feel like another woman’s memories, a girl who dreamt of her wedding day and her children and her glorious career as saviour of the alienage. The girl who did not wake every morning with the taste of blood on her tongue and bile rising in her throat. By the time she reached Lothering, reality had reared up and swallowed that dream whole, and she’d run out of tears to cry over it, even if she’d been offered a shoulder to cry on in time.
Pretty Leliana, with her wide, dreamy eyes and her tale of a vision from the Maker himself, would likely have been all too willing to offer her the comfort she’d ached for before Ostagar, but for all her sweetness and her charm, Luna couldn’t quite bring herself to trust the other woman. She wore a Chantry sister’s robes and piety well, but no sister she’d ever met had carried a bow with such easy grace, or shown such easy familiarity with the poisonous plants Morrigan reluctantly helped her gather along with the healing herbs.
“Did you know,” she began, brightly, the first night they camped outside town, “that in Orlais, we call elfroot persinette?”
“Sounds more like a name than a flower,” Alistair commented.
“ Persinette?” The ridiculous idea wrinkled her nose, the closest she’d come to a laugh in... a month? Two? She'd lost track of the days somewhere on the road to Ostagar, and still had not quite caught up with herself. “It could be a name, I guess. For a child you particularly disliked.”
Alistair stared at her for a moment, but somewhere, on the other side of the flames, she thought she heard a snigger from Morrigan.
“It speaks!” she said. “I thought you’d forgotten how to. I haven’t heard more than grunts from you since we left Flemeth’s house. I was starting to wonder if my mother had taken your tongue or your wits in one of her bargains.”
“Or perhaps neither of you were as charming as Leliana here,” she retorted, drawing a pout from Alistair, but Leliana’s eyes were fixed on Morrigan.
“Flemeth?” she asked, eyes wide, “The witch from legend?”
Morrigan shrugged, an elegant roll of her shoulders through the flames. “Perhaps. I never met another, but mayhap it’s a common enough name among the Chasind.” She smiled, wolfishly, “I can, however, confirm my mother is as great and terrible a witch as you could imagine, little bard.”
“Are you sure?” Leliana’s eyes were glittering as she returned Morrigan’s smile boldly, all Chantry modesty discarded. “I have an excellent imagination.”
Their voices were sweet enough to be mistaken for playful teasing, but Seluna could sense the undernotes of something that could, if left unchecked, become a battle for who was to rule the camp. She’d seen it often enough in the alienage, with large families crammed into tiny apartments, and she did not care to see it repeated in far less comfortable circumstances.
“What stories do they tell about witches in Orlais?” she asked, with a raised eyebrow she hoped Morrigan caught.
If Leliana noticed, she didn’t let it show: “Oh, we have our fair share of tales of blood magic and apostate wickedness, but my favourite when I was a little girl was The Elfroot Maid. Do you have that one in Ferelden?”
Alistair shook his head. “I always preferred stories of knights and heroes, when I was a boy.”
You hardly look like more than a boy now, Luna thought, but did not say aloud.
“Well, if you listen, there might be knights and heroes in this one,” Leliana teased. “Now, once, beyond nine seas, and beyond nine mountains, was a small cottage where two poor farmers lived. They scratched out a meagre living from barren soil, while, on the other side of a great stone wall, their neighbour’s garden bloomed with a thousand-thousand plants, because she was a great witch, and the earth itself obeyed her every whim. But these farmers were simple folk, and so in their prayers, they asked not for magic, or wealth, or a farm as lush as the garden they envied, but for smaller, simpler things: they longed for nothing more than a baby.”
It was a familiar beginning to a story, one she might have heard from her father a thousand times before, with Soris fidgeting to one side of her and Shianni asking questions to the other. She relaxed a little into the sensation, letting Leliana’s soft voice carry her back to that simpler, happier time.
“The Maker heard their prayers, and blessed them-” A scoffing noise from Morrigan, which Leliana ignored, “but as the child quickened and grew, the woman grew pale and sickly. No food could tempt her to eat, and she became too weak to rise from her bed. Her husband, who loved her with all his heart, begged her to tell him if there was anything in the world that could tempt her to eat, and for days she was silent, until, when he thought Death had already crept to her bedside, she said: ‘My love, I know of only one thing to cure such sickness – the elfroot that grows in the witch’s garden, but I will not ask it of you. She will not share her herbs, and she will kill a thief rather than lose a single leaf of her plants.’”
“Elfroot is hardly a rare herb,” Morrigan sniffed. “Tabris finds it growing in half the gutters in Lothering.”
“Ah, but this elfroot was special, because the soil in the witch’s garden had had many years of enchantment and work and even her own blood poured into it,” Leliana continued, as gracefully as if Morrigan’s interruption had been part of the story as she’d learned it, “and the man knew well that such a plant could easily save his wife and child, and he knew just as well that the witch, their neighbour, would sooner part with her own fingers than she would with her herbs. He had but one choice:” She paused, dramatically, before continuing: “to steal the elfroot that would save his wife from the garden of a great and powerful witch.”
She was rewarded with a quiet gasp from Alistair, who looked very young in the flickering firelight, his eyes fixed on Leliana as though he could see the story she wove with her words.
She lowered her voice, and it felt as though even the fire leaned closer to hear her next words: “One moonless night, he climbed over the great wall, and stole into the forbidden garden. There he saw plants the likes of which he had never imagined: vines with leaves of purest gold, berries which glowed like the embers of a dying fire, flowers with petals as clear as crystal, but only one could draw his gaze – the humble green leaves of the elfroot. With shaking hands, he drew his knife, and cut away the leaves that would save his wife and child.”
From the other side of the fire, Morrigan muttered something that might have been fool, as if nobody had ever told her a fairytale before. Then again, the brief impression she’d had of Flemeth made her think that most of the stories Morrigan might have heard as a child likely ended far more bloodily than Leliana’s.
“He was almost at the gate when he felt the coils of magic snare tight around him, and his feet rooted to the earth as though he had become a tree himself. From behind him, he heard, for the first time, the voice of his neighbour, the witch.
“‘Tell me, neighbour,’ she said, in a voice as chill as winter wind, ‘why you should not feed the roots of my children, who you have maimed? It has been many years since they have eaten so richly.’ The man was terrified, and would have crumpled to his knees, if the roots entangling him had allowed him to move.
“‘It was for my wife,’ he pleaded, ‘She is with child, and will die without a taste of the elfroot you grow here.’”
“What a hero,” Morrigan said, drily, “to surrender his wife in his place.”
Alistair elbowed her, and there might have been the beginnings of a scuffle had Luna not interjected, as she would have to her cousins: “Now, children, play nice.”
Alistair slumped with a muttered: “She started it,” but Morrigan raised a hand to her mouth to conceal something resembling a smile. Luna only caught it for a moment, but it was a strange, wild, lovely thing, made sweeter by the firelight and her attempt to conceal it. She wanted to capture it like a firefly in a jar, to hold it at her bedside to keep away the nightmares, but to tame something like that would make it so much less remarkable.
Leliana exchanged a conspiratorial glance with her, as though they were the adults and the others unruly children, before she continued: “‘Then your wife will follow you into the Void,’ the witch retorted, coldly, ‘and the world will be the better that she did not bring another thief into it.’
“‘Please,’ the man begged, though he knew words were but wind to a mage of such power, ‘I will pay any price you set, I will even give up my own life, only let me take the herbs to my wife first, that she may be well.’
“Then the witch smiled, as cruel and distant as the stars. ‘Anything?’ she asked, and the man knew his fate was sealed. ‘I do not wish for your life, mortal. You are worth less to me than the dying leaves you hold in your hands. But you may take those leaves, and more besides, on one condition – in three months, when your child is born, I will claim her, and raise her as my own.’”
“I can’t believe our new friend already knows about you,” Alistair muttered to Morrigan, and when he was elbowed this time, Luna did not intervene. The witch had earned that one.
Leliana ignored them: “The farmer pleaded, of course, but the witch would not be moved by his entreaties, and what was he to do? Without the elfroot, there would be no child at all, and no wife besides. He accepted the witch’s deal, and returned to his wife with armfuls of elfroot to heal and sustain her, and the woman grew strong again, and the child grew with her, until it was born: a perfect baby girl, with hair like spun gold, and eyes as green as elfroot.
“But no sooner had the child been wrapped in clean linen and placed in its mother’s arms than the witch appeared, sweeping through the window on the wings of a great raven, and laid claim to the child. The father’s pleading, the mother’s tears, neither could melt her heart of ice. She had set her price, and now she would collect. She bore the child away to a far-off tower, and named her-” and here she glanced at Luna, almost impish: “Persinette.”
“This is ridiculous,” Morrigan scoffed, pushing herself to her feet. “I was sent to fight an archdemon, not to listen to children’s stories.”
She swept off to her tent, leaving Alistair and Luna as the only audience to the rest of the story – the maiden in the tower growing to womanhood, falling in love with a prince and being cast out of the witch’s affections as a result, before the inevitable reunion and birth of two more beautiful, green-eyed children.
Leliana closed the story in the traditional Orlesian fashion: “And they lived well, and died happy, and no cup they drank from ever ran dry,” to a contented sigh from Alistair, and to Luna’s thanks and compliments. She really was an excellent storyteller. But as Luna retired to her own tent, her mind did not remain with the maiden in the tower or her golden shining prince, but on the witch who’d eaten at her own campfire. Had Morrigan’s sulk been prompted by boredom, or by something too familiar she’d seen in the story of the witch and her stolen daughter? Luna did not know, but for the first time since the horror of her wedding day, she wanted to find out.