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Chapter Text

Blood-spattered but triumphant, the generals of mighty Elvhenan returned from the warfront to celebrate their success among the gold and marble spires of Arlathan. To the victors go the spoils, it’s said, and the festivities proved a testament to that: rich meals prepared over months, bottomless casks of wine, lively dancing and song, unreserved coupling—debauched days and nights that went on for centuries.

The greatest of the generals, who would play at being gods, gathered at Elgar’nan’s table: Andruil, Dirthamen, Falon’Din, Ghilan’nain, Sylaise, June, and Mythal. Amongst themselves, they partook of every delight—food, drink, fine fabrics, and bare skin—thriving on extravagance. Only one stood apart from the furor: Fen’Harel, who saw in their indulgence the makings of corruption.

When he voiced his wise warnings to Mythal, she disregarded them, bidding him join her at table regardless. He did, for he was a loyal friend, but only to face ridicule from the others for what they called his prudishness, reserve, and melancholy.

“Are you so proud, Dread Wolf, that you will not take one drink, or a lover from among your friends?” asked Elgar’nan. “It is not for want of offers. Are the pleasures of your spirit-made-flesh so far beneath you?”

“I did not seek to be made flesh,” Fen’Harel replied, “but as such, I have not neglected the needs or nature of this form.”

“Yet you will not deign to enjoy them with us?” said Andruil, who had offered for him before.

“Or any other?” said June.

“As you dally with your slaves?” said Fen’Harel. “No.”

Elgar’nan laughed, a grating boom through the hall. “Perhaps he lacks the skill to please. Unless he serves you as more than a lap dog, Mythal.”

Fen’Harel snarled, but it was Mythal’s icy regard that struck Elgar’nan silent. Bold and arrogant as he was becoming, he knew when to restrain himself against her displeasure.

“His affections are of a higher form,” said Sylaise, edged with derision. “He would not lower himself to carnality.”

Fen’Harel said bitterly, “I am not above such reproach. I can be carnal, as I can be savage. Ask the titans—what’s left of them.” He looked to Mythal and, finding her as pale and unmoved as alabaster, continued, “But I will not destroy myself in pursuit of pleasure—or power.”

Ghilan’nain dismissed him with a gesture. “Spare us your tedious protests, Wolf. If you will not enjoy the evening with us, then go. We have no desire to have the mood spoiled by your moaning.”

“See, the only moans he elicits are his own,” said Falon’Din, toasting with an overfull wine cup to the accompaniment of laughter from the others.

Fen’Harel, head held high, said, “I am master of my passions; yours will be your undoing,” and went through the eluvian, leaving them to their indulgences.

A tale of Fen’Harel, as recounted by General Felassan to fellows at the Lighthouse, in the time of rebellion

Chapter Text

Gentle rain hung a misted curtain over the heath, lightly yet steadily seeping into linen and leather. The clothes stuck to Ellana’s clammy skin, tight over her knees and shoulders as she crouched at the treeline with a borrowed bow in hand. It was too big for her, the string so difficult to pull that even if she were the first to spot a ram, she wouldn’t be able to nock an arrow before the other hunters had loosed.

A proper weapon should’ve been made for her years ago, when she’d come of age, but ironbark was scarce and given to those among Clan Lavellan who could best use it. That was, decidedly, not Ellana. Whether or not she wielded a bow made to suit, her skills with it were middling at best; and unlike the other hunters, she couldn’t devote all her time to honing them. She had to attend the Keeper’s lessons alongside Hathaan, her fellow apprentice.

It was rare to have two children with magical ability born into the clan so near one another. Ellana was only a year Hathaan’s senior, and when his magic had emerged in a burst of ice on his fourth birthday, Deshanna had decreed both he and Ellana would be trained. But from the start, spellcraft had come easier to him. While Ellana could draw upon the Fade, her efforts were clumsy in comparison.

As the time came for the Keeper to choose a First, they were expected to demonstrate their abilities, and the more capable one would succeed her. The other would be, by Dalish tradition, sent away to another clan—or simply sent away.

Though that contest was still months hence, Ellana had already begun to gather whispers of the shemlen world beyond the clan, for when she was tossed out into it.

A rustle of the scrubgrass at thirty paces announced the arrival of a pair of rams: juveniles by the size of them and by their playful snorts as they nipped at one another. The hunter nearest Ellana drew his bow, sighting down the shaft of the arrow. She watched it fly true, and one of the rams fell with the point in its eye. The second didn’t have time to bellow in fear before it too fell. Ellana was glad for the kindness of a quick death—one she never could’ve given the rams herself, had she bothered to try at all.

As the other hunters slipped out of the trees to retrieve their prizes, she stayed back, untouched quiver heavy and forbidding between her shoulder blades. When she returned to the clan’s circle of aravels, that would not escape the elder hunters’ notice, and as familiar as their disappointment was, she wasn’t yet prepared to face it.

Slinging the unused bow across her chest, she left the hunters to their work and sank deeper into the forest.

What little evening sunlight still shone gave way to gloom among the trees. Ellana stopped to breathe in the strangely sweet odor of a fallen tree rotting nearby, the damp leather musk of her clothes, and the sharper, flint-spark essence of the Fade where it lay on the other side of a fragile barrier. The Veil was thin here, staticky and vacillant—tingling at the back of her neck. 

While neither fireballs nor healing came easily, her sense of the Veil had always been keen. If she reached out at the right time, in the right place, she could feel its tenuous hold on the Fade. Like stretched vellum in front of a candle flame, she could make out the veins, or threads, of power shot through it, thrumming with magic to keep demons at bay.

Ellana extended a hand to find a thread. It was unusually distinct, a tensile guide farther into the trees and darkness. She knew better than to wander the woods alone at night, but little of interest awaited her at the clan’s camp; she wasn’t even particularly hungry for fire-roasted ram. Instead, she plucked the thread with the tip of her forefinger and followed where it led:

To a grove of evergreens encircling an open patch of needle-strewn ground—curious in a forest that was otherwise wild with undergrowth. The tidy arrangement appeared intentional, but the trunks were so wide and soared so high that if they had been planted by elven hands, it was hundreds of years ago. Browned, pointed needles pricked the soles of Ellana’s bare feet as she moved between the trees. The air was entirely still.

The Veil, however, quivered as if in the wind, an uncannily living thing. Ellana caressed the thread she had traced to this place and it sparked in response, briefly numbing her hand. Surprised, she stumbled back, into the center of the grove. The ground, which had been firm and root-riddled throughout the forest, shifted.

Like the rams, Ellana had no time to cry out before she met her fate: sliding in a cascade of piney soil into the hole that had opened beneath her.

She landed on the meat of her backside with a shockwave of discomfort from her tailbone upward. More dirt and pine needles landed on her back and head as she caught her breath. The stale fetor of age filled her nostrils, and all around her was blackness. A glance up revealed the edges of the sinkhole were beyond her reach, even if she stood.

“Fenedhis,” she cursed, planting her hands on the ground. No, not naked ground but stone under her palms: flat slabs crusted with lichen.

Ruins—human, dwarven, or elven—weren’t common in this part of the Marches, but she had, it seemed, discovered one, and Creators only knew how long it had been undisturbed. Unease pooled in the pit of Ellana’s empty stomach, for stories of hapless wanderers stumbling upon ancient places often featured grisly deaths at the claws of resident beasts or, worse, at the ethereal hands of restless spirits.

Thankfully, Ellana didn’t sense either, only the Veil around her, filling the dark pit. The thread pulsed again, toward an indeterminate point ahead.

As she started to rise, the bowstring across her chest went lax. Blindly, she reached behind her to find the lower limb of the recurve splintered. Frustration made her eyes sting. She’d deliver yet another disappointment to her clan when she brought a broken bow back to camp.

If she got back to camp, considering the distance between her and the forest floor above.

She set the ruined bow and her unused quiver aside. The Veil swayed as she conjured a flame in her palm to see by.

She stood, unmistakably, in a purpose-built chamber, not a raw hole in the ground. Six intact columns supported remnants of a ceiling, save for the part Ellana had fallen through. The fire she held reflected off the tiles of a mosaic on each of four walls, surrounding her in color.

Figures with the pointed ears of her people made a procession through the mosaic, dressed in elegant robes and shimmering armor no Dalish elf could have owned. The buildings they progressed toward were unlike anything Ellana had seen, even on the few occasions the clan had ventured close enough to Val Royeaux to spot its resplendent painted towers. Crystal spires stood against cloud-dotted skies, though the hue was closer to violet than blue, like the tint of Fade-bound dreams.

The Veil thread shivered insistently, drawing Ellana to an image carved in stone against the far wall: a snarling wolf sitting on its haunches, head held high to survey its domain. At its feet was an altar where desiccated bundles of herbs and the ash of burned incense lay. Ellana yelped in alarm when a figure appeared behind the statue. She reached frantically for a spell to defend herself, but the figure proved to be her own reflection in a tall mirror, its surface foggy at the edges but otherwise unmarred.

Ellana approached with caution, appraising her bedraggled appearance: tendrils of dark hair escaping a damp braid to curl around the vallaslin at her brow; an aquiline nose and cheekbones prominent enough to make her blue-gray eyes appear deep-set; clothes smeared with mud, soaked through, and turning cold in the underground chill.

The wolf statue’s back was visible in the reflection, hackles raised in threat—attack or defense, Ellana couldn’t be sure, but she was coming to suspect what this place was, or had been: a shrine to Fen’Harel.

Her people hadn’t venerated the Betrayer in centuries. Respect was lent him by all Dalish, for he did keep a vigilant watch of his people, but it always came with due wariness. Fen’Harel had tricked the Creators and turned against them. In the blacker tales, it was he who had slain Mythal, the kindly mother of all creation. Ellana had been taught throughout the twenty years of her life to, above all, beware the Dread Wolf.

The flame cupped in her hand began to gutter—she could never maintain it very long—but two braziers stood on either side of the altar and, by some stroke of luck, still contained unburned fuel. Ellana set the weak mage’s flame to the chunks of wood in one brazier. They hissed with damp for a few moments before catching. The resultant light was still limited, but enough to allow her to inspect the rest of the chamber.

She’d hoped there might be invasive roots she could use to climb out, but the vibrant walls were smooth. Other than the columns, the tallest thing in the chamber was the figure of Fen’Harel, and inert stone or not, she preferred to stay well away from it.

Yet, a wink of gold between the wolf’s paws caught her eye. She moved toward it in short, leery steps, until she could see it properly: the hilt of a small knife nestled in with the other offerings on the altar. The blade was tarnished by time and belowground moisture, the leather grip peeling, but the golden circle at the pommel glinted. Despite it having been offered to the Dread Wolf, she picked it up and admired it.

The workmanship was impressive, with elaborate whorls of what may have been words or symbols up and down the blade. Cleaning it and wrapping the grip again would be easy enough; it would fit perfectly at her hip. If the edge was still keen—

Ellana hissed as the skin of her fingertip parted where she’d put it to the blade. Discolored through it was, the steel had stayed deadly sharp.

Slipping the knife into her belt, she reached for a tattered piece of cloth, perhaps once a covering for the altar, to stanch the bleeding. As she extend her arm, three drops of blood landed on the wolf’s paws, as vivid as chips in the mosaic.

The Veil undulated, bringing Ellana up short. Two more droplets spattered the altar and, as she watched, reflected a wavering light that emanated from the surface of the tall mirror. It rippled silver and blue, overpowering the fire in the brazier. Fear gripped Ellana’s throat as a shadow filled the mirror, black against its luminosity. When it stepped out of the mirror and into the chamber, the brightness cut off, leaving Ellana to face whatever had come through it with a broken bow, a stolen knife, and her meager skill with spellcraft.

The brazier’s light caught small shining points set against pale skin: a delicate golden cuff at the top of a knife-sharp ear; a round stud in one nostril of a strong nose; a delicate ring in a full lower lip. Confusion knitted a stern brow over storm sea eyes—gray irises edged with deep blue, oddly like Ellana’s own, yet without any suggestion of her timidity. No, the elf who had come through the mirror had a dauntless bearing and wore fabrics so fine he might’ve walked out of the shrine’s mosaics.

Glancing around the chamber and then back at Ellana, he advanced two steps, speaking in quick, liquid words it took her altogether too long to identify as the ancient elvhen tongue. While most Dalish spoke little more than a few phrases, Keeper Deshanna had studied what remained of their predecessors’ language extensively. She had passed that knowledge on to both her apprentices, and in a rare show of savvy, Ellana had picked it up best.

Yet, for all her lessons, she could barely keep up with the flourishes of this elf’s pronunciation and cadence. His vocabulary far exceeded hers, every syllable fluid and spoken in a deep baritone. He gesticulated for emphasis, Ellana catching every fourth or fifth word—where, expected, misled. She strained to focus, but it was all too much, too fast.

Raising her hands in what she hoped was a universal gesture of stop, she said in the ancient tongue, “Please. Please speak slowly and with, ah”—she sought the correct translation—“short words.”

He cut his tirade blessedly off, eyebrows drawing in again. Ellana despaired for a heartbeat that he hadn’t understood her, but then he said, slowly and in short words, “What is this place? It is not where I expected to be when I came through the eluvian.”

Ellana’s shoulders eased with relief. They could make sense of each other, after all. Indeed, she took a measure of pride in having gleaned all that he said, save for one word. “Eluvian?” she asked.

He gestured to the mirror. “You do not recognize it? Strange.” Fixing her with a more pointed, studying gaze, he took a step closer. Ellana retreated, tripping over the quiver she’d abandoned. The elf halted beyond striking distance. “You do not need to be afraid,” he said. “My temper was not aimed at you. You did not bring me here.”

Considering the rivulets of red trailing from the cut on her finger, Ellana wasn’t entirely certain of that. The eluvian had been nothing more than a fancy mirror before she’d bled on Fen’Harel’s altar.

The elf’s attention followed hers to her bloodstained palm. “You’re hurt. I can see to it, if you will let me close enough.”

“You’re a healer?” Ellana said, wary and making no move to permit him nearer.

“Not strictly speaking,” he replied, “but such a thing is not beyond me. Your hand, da’len.”

“I’m not little,” Ellana said, sharply and out of old habit. Her growth had come late, as compared to Hathaan, and he had never let her forget it—until she went through a spurt at sixteen and surpassed his height by two fingers’ width. This elf stood taller than her, but only by half a head; he had no more right to call her little—or a child—than Hathaan did.

He noted her pique and amended, “Ir abelas…my lady.”

It was not a title her people used, though she knew it from old songs of Ghilan’nain and the other goddesses. Perhaps where he came from a Keeper’s apprentice merited it, but not among Clan Lavellan, and the formality made her shift uncomfortably.

The elf offered his open hand in a gesture of peace. “Come, let me heal you. That cut is nearly to the bone.”

Ellana might have been obstinate and claimed she could do the healing herself, but she was tired, cold, and now that the initial fright of the elf’s arrival was diminishing, her finger throbbed. Had she been hale and fully rested, the healing would take effort, but in her present state, she wasn’t convinced she could do it at all.

Resigned, she stepped up to the elf and held her finger out for his inspection. His long fingers curled around her hand, warm and soft. She felt the tingle-burn of magic over the cut, itching as it knit the flesh. In hardly any time at all, it was done. The blood, too, was cleaned away.

“Ma serannas,” she said. Then, calling up another archaic title from the songs, added, “Master.”

Fury crossed his face in an instant, vehement and fierce. Ellana almost recoiled, but his hold kept her in place. “Do not call me that,” he said, enunciating clearly, perhaps to ensure he was understood. “I keep no slaves and permit none to address me as if I do.”

“Forgive me,” said Ellana hurriedly. “I don’t have the command of this language you do. If I misspoke, I meant no offense.”

The cloud of anger blew off his features, affording Ellana a better view of them. Light freckling dusted his high cheekbones, jaw sloping to a dimpled chin. His nose was long, thick at the bridge, and slightly hooked at the tip. A crease between his eyebrows that hadn’t entirely eased lent him severity, but it was offset by the collection of gilt piercings and a thick fall of honey-colored hair over one side of his head. His clothes were draped with care, in a brand of masculine splendor no Lavellan hunter could’ve hoped to match.

“I see that you did not,” he said. “And your speech is unusual, as if it is not your mother tongue.”

“It isn’t,” said Ellana. “I only know this much because my Keeper has an interest.”

“‘Keeper,’” he said. “So you are a slave.”

“No!” Ellana exclaimed. She yanked her healed hand out of his grip. “The Dalish swore we would never submit to slavery again after Tevinter.”

He was unbothered by her affront; rather pensive, with wrinkles of consternation at the corners of his eyes. “I have not heard these names before. Tell me, where am I?”

“In a forest outside of Wycome,” said Ellana. “In the Free Marches. And this—” Uncertain of the ancient word for ‘shrine,’ she decided on: “This is a place of honor. For a god.”

He peered about again, regard landing on the snarling wolf. “Which god?”

Ellana looked to the statue as well, reluctant to invoke the Betrayer’s name; but she said anyway, “Fen’Harel.”

The elf’s mouth opened like a narrow wound, a bitter grimace. When he spoke, it was flatly: “It seems the Dread Wolf is not so honored, if this moldering place is his.”

A queer, discomfiting sensation started in Ellana’s stomach and crawled upward, until she could feel its heat in her cheeks: embarrassment, maybe even guilt. At disrespect to Fen’Harel? Impossible.

She said, “He is not the chosen of many.”

The elf rounded on her, hair swinging. “But he is your chosen, if you are here now?”

Ellana, startled by his sharp attention, replied with far less conviction than she’d intended: a shamefully meek “No.”

“Are you certain?” he asked, the angry vehemence of his arrival returning. “It would have taken a great deal to divert my course to bring me here.”

Ellana’s face burned, even as icy dread slid down her back. “You?”

He offered a bladed smile. “If you spilled blood on this altar in a summons, who did you think would answer?”

Around the pounding of that selfsame blood in her ears, Ellana whispered, “Fen’Harel.”

“Indeed,” he said. “And Elgar’nan will be pleased to know that title has spread so far beyond Arlathan. He planted the seed of it to vex me, and I am sure this will have him laughing for centuries.”

Ellana was shaking all over. He spoke of the fallen city as if it still existed, and of the all-father of the elves in irritation rather than respect. He being the Dread Wolf, trickster and betrayer, himself.

For a fleeting moment, she considered kneeling or making some other reverence, but her body stayed rigid. All she could do was stare at him, this man who didn’t remotely resemble the six-eyed beast of legend, or the shadowy figure with pointed teeth and clawed hands who had featured in girlhood nightmares.

Though neither was he possessed of godlike, faultless beauty, as the Creators were often described. Not that he wasn’t handsome—he was, in his finery and with such indignant self-assurance—but his face was angular and prone of sternness; too unconventional for divine perfection. That, Ellana decided, made him all the more compelling to look upon.

He caught her staring out, and, bemused, worried the ring in his lip with the tip of his tongue. A more agreeable shiver than fear passed through Ellana, prickling her skin like her awareness of the Veil. She felt it still, humming with its own awareness—of Fen’Harel.

“You have a name for me,” he said to her. “I should like to have yours.”

Unable to defy a god, she gave it.

“Ellana Lavellan,” he echoed. “Is this your homeland? This Free Marches?”

She shook her head. “We have no homes, since we were driven from the Dales.”

Fen’Harel sighed through his nose. “I believed I knew every path through June's eluvians, but none of this is familiar. And I pride myself on my knowledge.” He bit at his lip again, and Ellana unwittingly wet her own.

“You know of me,” he went on, “so others must have come here from Elvhenan before. You wear vallaslin, yet claim you have no master. Only this ‘Keeper.’” He ran a hand over the left side of his head, where the hair was shorn to the scalp. “And there is something about this place. Something dulled.” Lifting his forefingers, he traced a line of green light in the air. Around her, Ellana felt answering waves in the Veil, resonating like a plucked string.

Fen’Harel’s curious expression turned to revulsion. “What is this? A barrier”—he plied the Veil again and hissed—“to muffle magic? To lock it away? How can this be?” His questions came hectic and hasty; Ellana struggled to catch all the words. “It is wrong. Has it always been here?”

Unknowing of the translation for ‘veil’ or ‘fade,’ Ellana used her language for the explanation in his: “The Veil separates us from the raw Fade. It means the magic is locked away, yes, but that’s because it’s dangerous.”

He pinned her with a wild look. “Dangerous?” A grunt of annoyance. “Yes, magic can be that, if improperly taught. But this—” He gestured at the empty air, and even with the small movement, the Veil shifted to accommodate him. “It is unbearable. I feel as though I am suffocating. How can one cast anything with this…what did you call it?”

“Veil. It’s not, um—oh, what’s the word?” She couldn’t begin to guess, so she tried: “Things can pass through it. Magic can. But demons and the worst of the Fade can’t, unless they’re summoned.”

“It is permeable,” said Fen’Harel, enunciating the word so she could hear all its syllables.

“Permeable,” said Ellana, in confirmation of her understanding.

Fen’Harel kept his gaze on her. “Show me.”

“What?” she asked, disgracefully akin to a squawk.

“A spell,” he pressed. “Show me how you can use any magic at all with this curb.” A questioning pause. “Ah, you are not a mage.”

“I am,” said Ellana, unusually compelled to claim it. Though as soon as she did, her heart sank, for she too often made a poor show when she had to perform on command, even when it was just her, Deshanna, and Hathaan. Failing in front of a god was enough to make her nauseous.

“Ellana,” said Fen’Harel, softer. “Show me.”

She couldn’t refuse, and so drew in a deep, steadying breath before reaching out to seek the infinitesimal gaps in the Veil, behind which the Fade roiled and snarled, eager to break free. With careful determination, she drew enough magic to ignite a modest flame in her palm. It threw orange and yellow across Fen’Harel’s features: full of pity.

“That took such great effort,” he said.

Shame washed through Ellana in an overwhelming surge, and the flame went out. “I’m a mage,” she said quietly, “just not a very good one.”

“I do not think anyone could be, considering this Veil,” said Fen’Harel, “but”—he brought his hand to the level of her chest—“may I?”

Letting the Dread Wolf hold her hand to heal it had been a risk; to permit him to touch her again was utterly foolish; and yet she had lifted her chin in invitation before she found the words in his language to rebuff him.

He pressed his hand, fingers spread wide, to her breastbone, over the damp linen of her shirt. “Call the fire again.”

Easier said than done with the heat of his flesh soaking through to hers, but she forced her eyes closed to seek the Fade. The Veil shimmered, threads shifting. This time, the flame came to her more readily and shone far brighter. When she opened her eyes to see it, she found Fen’Harel watching her.

“It is not for want of power that you struggled before,” he said. “There is a great well of it in you. This Veil is an imposition, but if you had the right instruction, you would be an adept mage.”

Incandescent hope lit in Ellana’s breast, under where his hand still lay, but she said, “My Keeper is the best mage of any clan we’ve encountered. I couldn’t ask for a better teacher.”

Fen’Harel’s gaze was on the collar of Ellana’s shirt, where his forefinger rested. A small sound escaped her throat as his fingertip slipped between the laces to graze bare skin. It drew his eyes up to hers; they shone with interest. “Couldn’t you?” he asked.

“No,” said Ellana. Unless she went to the Circles of Magi, which were little more than well-appointed prisons, complete with a full guard of templars.

With the light pressure of that single fingertip at the hollow of her throat, Fen’Harel said, “Why did you seek the Dread Wolf, then, if not to beg my teachings?”

Ellana sucked in air, working only to push her chest into his touch. “It was an accident! I would never dare to— Presume to—” Inconvenience a god with her mundane circumstance. She doubted her prayers—when she said them, which wasn’t often—would even catch one’s attention.

“I believe you,” Fen’Harel said, “but regardless, I am here, and I am feeling…benevolent. I will teach you some spells, if the right offering is made.”

Excitement banished Ellana’s chagrin. “I would be honored,” she said, “but I have only a broken bow, six arrows, a blade—” She choked on horror. “Oh, no, it’s yours! Laid at your altar. I shouldn’t have taken it!”

Fen’Harel said, dismissive, “I have no use for such weapons. I can make my own.” With a flick of his free hand, he sent spikes of ice crashing into the corner of the chamber. Ellana managed not to flinch at the display, of which he seemed to approve. Teasing the laces at her neck again, he asked, “What else can you offer, Ellana Lavellan?”

The sultry implication was shocking enough to strike her dumb. Fen’Harel, elegant and imposing, ancient and beautiful in his uncommon way, was making an advance—on her.

A lifetime spent fearing the Dread Wolf demanded she flee at the very notion, but she was drawn to the shimmering gold cuff at the top of his ear. The point was slightly pink, like mortal blood, the same as Ellana’s, ran in his veins. His hand was solid and sure against her chest, and he smelled of felandaris, an herb she knew well. Together, it worked to make him less an exalted deity and more an elvhen man—one who sensed untapped power within her. To reach that and finally find a real place among her clan, she would give anything. Including:

“Myself. I offer myself.”

Fen’Harel blinked once, as if he hadn’t quite expected her to take his bait, but the hesitation didn’t last. He lowered his voice to say, “That will be sufficient,” and, plucking at Ellana’s shirt, gave a hum that curled in her ears and thrilled down her spine. “Come, take these clothes off and warm yourself by the fire.”

The brazier threw less heat than it did light, which was very little, but it was forgotten in a blaze of green fire springing to life at the center of the chamber. Warmth came in waves despite the lack of logs to feed it.

“How—” Ellana started, spellbound by the leaping flames.

Fen’Harel chucked her under the chin. “That will be our lesson, once due offerings are made.” He swept the cloak from around his shoulders and laid it on the flagstones near the fire. “Sit there once you have undressed.” When she remained still, he lifted his eyebrows. “Should I look away?”

He dared her to balk, but modesty was a shemlen virtue; the Dalish had no reservations about showing skin. Sharing a stream to bathe with ten other people was common, and privacy unusual in a small number of aravels. Ellana wasn’t shy of stripping bare, though she had never done so for anyone.

Since she’d come of age, less than a handful of men had looked at her with desire, and their encounters had been little more than youthful fumbling: unpracticed kisses and gropes, half-dressed and just out of sight of the clan’s camp. It wasn’t that she was plain—her eyes were fetching, her skin unblemished and creamy, her limbs long and slender—but her people were practical; a person’s usefulness to the clan was their most attractive trait. Ellana’s awkwardness among them, caught between undistinguished magery and poor skill in the hunts, was no great enticement for lovers. While the other young Lavellan women had enjoyed several, Ellana was yet unbedded.

She’d expected to remain so until a bond was arranged for her—and it would be, if she couldn’t find her own partner; it was essential to keep the clan’s numbers up with new babes as often as could be managed. However, if she lost the contest for First to Hathaan and was released into the wider world, that avenue would be closed to her. Seeing as it was likelier than success, she’d anticipated taking a human to bed someday, even if they were imposingly large compared to the slighter elves.

Though the one standing with her in the chamber was broader across the shoulders than most Lavellan men, with a sturdy chest and narrow waist, where a silver belt was cinched. Not human-large but alluringly bigger than she was, Fen’Harel awaited her response to his challenge.

Ellana gave it by putting her fingers to the clasps of her jerkin and unfastening them.

“Tell me now, Falon’Din, what I can or cannot do,” Fen’Harel murmured, though not for her ears, Ellana thought. He went to the cape and sat cross-legged on it, resting his hands on his knees to watch her shrug free of the jerkin. In the coolness of the chamber, the peaks of her breasts stood out against her shirt. Looking to them, Fen’Harel tongued the ring in his lip. Ellana’s nerves sensitized.

The laces at the neck of her shirt were simple enough to undo, and the hem came free of her trousers in two firm tugs. She gathered it in her hands, exposing a sliver of her middle. Fen’Harel didn’t move or speak to encourage her, but there was no mistaking the sheen of appetite in his blue-gray eyes. The muscles of Ellana’s stomach contracted as if he’d touched her there, and she lifted the shirt over her head.

“Lay it out to dry,” Fen’Harel said before she could drop it in a heap.

Ellana nearly cursed. Not thinking of that herself would’ve earned her a stern scolding from the elder hunters, who taught all the clan’s children how to survive in the wilds. Dry clothes could mean life or death, especially in a sinkhole as cool night descended. Those lessons should not have been so easily forgotten, but bare-breasted and under Fen’Harel’s hungry scrutiny, there was space for little else than him in Ellana’s mind.

She spread the shirt on now-heated stones, and, rising to her full height again, heard Fen’Harel say, “The rest, too.”

Her hands were, to her surprise, steady as she set to work on her belt, pulling the tongue through the simple knot and ring. She set the knife aside with it. The laces of her trousers came undone with ease, a small mercy in an inexpert attempt to make her undressing remotely appealing to watch. While no practiced seductress, she was well aware of that lovers’ play.

Her heartbeat stuttered.

Lovers.

Was that they they were to be, she and Fen’Harel?

No. She was making an offering in exchange for his knowledge. She could use it to best Hathaan and earn her place as First. She wouldn’t be thrown to the wolves beyond the clan.

A strangled laugh stuck at the root of her tongue. Perhaps she would be spared the unfriendly packs of shemlen, but she was tight in the jaws of a wolf all the same.

Hooking her thumbs in the waistband of her trousers, she eased them over her hips and down. Fen’Harel watched her progress, and bold as she played at being, she couldn’t stare back at him. She gave all her focus to stepping out of the trousers and her undergarments, separating them and fastidiously laying both out in the fire’s light.

The licking green flames bathed her in much-needed warmth and lit the naked lines of her body. If her fortitude were to crumble, it would be now.

Her first had always been a distant imagining, abstract and faceless. Even after she’d gotten shallow tastes of passion with the clan boys, she had never cast them as the man to lay her down. He had remained a shadow in her fantasies, his caresses whispers of supposition: what a young woman dreamed her lover would do when she had no experience. It was fitting, then, that Fen’Harel had arrived in shadow from the eluvian, though never in Ellana’s most outlandish dreams could she have conjured the Dread Wolf to bed. But he was beautiful, and a Dalish girl with no other prospects would be a fool not to take him.

Turning from the fire, Ellana looked to where he waited for her. He sat with measured poise, still cross-legged. “Come, sit,” he said.

She did, sinking onto the woven fabric of his cloak. Her fingertips brushed the fur at the collar, wonderfully soft. A still-damp braid of her hair hung against her shoulder, and when Fen’Harel reached for it, she didn’t stop him. He stroked the leather thong at the end of the braid, then tugged until it gave and fell away. Ellana breathed through parted lips as he unwound the three ropes of hair, fanning it out across her back. Rain had made it unruly, and Ellana pulled a face when Fen’Harel drew a pine needle from somewhere in the mane.

“Don’t do that,” he said, using his fingers as a careful comb. “You are lovely. Wild. Artless.”

She frowned. Such a description wasn’t complimentary in her language.

Fen’Harel said, “I mean that as praise. In Arlathan, beauty is a craft and a currency. Decades are spent on choosing a wardrobe for one party, on delicate magics to make lips redder and hair into glossy curls.” He stroked through hers, wavy and far from sleek. “I had forgotten how fine uncontrived beauty could be.”

Ellana trembled. Whether or not he really meant it, no one had ever paid her such courtesy, and she was ensnared.

“Are you shivering from cold,” he asked, “or my touch?” The backs of his knuckles grazed the nape of her neck, bringing on another shudder and a tremulous sigh. “Mm. That is my answer, I think.” He ventured along the side of her neck, the join of her shoulder, and across her collarbone.

She’d been handled enough to hold her composure as he reached the swell of her left breast, though her pulse was a frenzied beat and her thoughts a jumble of uncertainty and instinct. That instinct won out when he drew a circle around her nipple; she made a sound dreadfully close to a whimper.

Fen’Harel didn’t withdraw, but neither did he press further. “Have you had many lovers, Ellana?”

Too muddled by his proximity and the progress of his fingertip to be ashamed, she replied, “No.”

He circled and circled, without brushing the taut peak of her breast. “Any?”

She shifted in a weak attempt to steer his touch where she craved it. He adjusted easily to deny her, and she bit back a groan. He said her name again, more insistently, and she told him, “Not like this.”

The gust of his exhale moved over her neck. “This is no small offer you make to me, then. Magic must mean very much to you.”

“It does,” Ellana said. “I want you”—she drew in a sharp breath as he tightened the circle around her nipple—“to teach me.”

At last, he took her nipple between his thumb and forefinger, and a bolt of pleasure shot from that point to her center. With a gasp, Ellana latched onto his slender wrist to hold him in place.

“So eager,” he said. “And none of it artifice.” A silent pause, his fingers still moving at her breast, and then: “You offer everything, but I will not ask for so much.”

Ellana turned her face to his, haze of avidity clearing to bewilderment. “You don’t want to lie with me?”

He soothed her with a touch to her knee, saying with gentle insistence, “Lie back.”

Perplexed as she was, Ellana obeyed, lowering herself to recline. Unfolding his long legs, Fen’Harel moved to kneel at her side, regarding her from above.

A graceful gesture of his left hand limned it in emerald, an expertly crafted spellwork glove; none of the errant flashes that came with Ellana’s attempts. “This color,” he said, “is distinct. An effect of your Veil. A pollutant. The magic I know has no shade.” He spread his fingers, turning his palm down and casting a shadow across Ellana’s bare belly. “It bears studying, but”—his gaze, bright with carnality, traced her form—“not now.”

He lowered his hand until Ellana could feel the potent energy he effortlessly kept in check tingling against her skin. Yet, he didn’t touch her, staying a hairsbreadth distant.

“You will tell me if I do anything you do not care for.” The gravity in his voice brooked no protest, leaving Ellana to nod mutely. A subtle flex of his fingers sent sensation skittering over her stomach, the barely visible hairs rising. “Magic can harm, and it can heal. You have learned these things, surely. But do you know it can please?”

Ellana watched his middle finger dip toward her navel, stopping just short of grazing its edge. But a pulse emanated from the not-quite-touch, rippling out like a stone hitting the surface of a pond. Her nipples tightened, her thighs pressing together to alleviate the sudden pressure between them.

Fen’Harel gave her only a moment’s respite before releasing another pulse of magic: a thousand tiny points of pleasure across bare flesh and beneath it—through bone and muscle to waken sensitive places yet unknown. Her lower back curved off the stone floor as her breath came short. She squeezed her legs tight, this time chasing the thrill there.

“I could bring you to your peak without a touch,” said Fen’Harel, a rasp of approval in his voice.

Ellana believed him. No hunter’s roving hands or her own fingertips could’ve made her feel as though lightning had struck her all over.

Still, she’d reveled in how he had teased her breasts, how she had scented the felandaris on him as he’d sat close, murmuring in her ear. She wanted his touch, but the words to ask for it in either language were lost in a third overwhelming rush of magic. She writhed, shameless in jerking her hips and in letting slip a too-loud moan.

“It is a loss that these spells are not known to you,” Fen’Harel said when he had released her. “You have missed much for their absence.” He glided his bespelled hand over her mound, and, unbidden, her thighs fell open. He said something in his tongue Ellana didn’t catch, but it made no matter as he cupped her sex—a yearned-for touch charged with the spell.

His right hand landed firmly on her breastbone to hold her in place as she arched up in response. It was almost too much, making her see stars and her center clench around emptiness, but he kept her mindfully at the edge, before pleasure turned to discomfort.

When the wave subsided, Ellana went lax, panting. Between her legs, the green glow dissipated; but Fen’Harel’s hand stayed in place. He caught her gaze and held it, observant as he crooked his middle finger against her, dipping into the ample slickness there.

“We have barely begun,” he said, “and already you could take me.”

Ellana parted her legs further: unspoken permission.

He made a rumbling sound in his chest.

If it was a caution, it fell flat. Ellana had never been so aroused, never so aware of an unfulfilled need. She’d been in no rush to invite a clan boy to breach her so, but Fen’Harel’s graceful hands were enticing, and enthrallingly skillful. She canted her hips so that he was poised at the edge of her slit.

He narrowed his eyes, but rather than scold her for forwardness, he eased the tip of his finger into her, and with it magic.

Ellana all but shouted, grasping at the cloak beneath her.

Fen’Harel pinned her between that one finger and his hand on her chest. “Be mindful what you ask for,” he said.

Ellana, ‘wild’ and ‘artless’ as she likely sounded, said, “More. Give me more.”

He didn’t move to do so, or to withdraw. His head tipped slightly to the side, inquisitive.

Ellana’s words—greedy and demanding—ricocheted in her head until sense cooled her fervor. She had issued an order to a god; such a trespass was unthinkable.

 “Ir abelas,” she said. “I should not have spoken to you so.”

Fen’Harel regarded her steadily—without ire. “Perhaps it is for the better, then, that I did not understand. You spoke in your tongue.” His thumb softly brushed the swell of her breast. “Did you curse me? Tell me to stop?”

“No!” said Ellana, emphatic. “I—” She pressed her lips together, reluctant to say it again, now that she was not so addled. She steeled herself to admit: “I asked for more.”

His avid regard scorched, as if he’d sent magic through her again. But his hands were plain pale, no spellwork to tantalize her; he could do that with only a look.

“Come,” he said, “sit up against me.”

Chilly air caressed Ellana’s center as he drew his hand away, and she shivered against it. Fen’Harel shifted to a seat on his backside, his legs parted to make space between them. Reaching for Ellana, he drew her from where she lay to settle into him, her naked back against his chest. 

The neckline of his shirt hung open, his flesh heated and smooth at Ellana’s nape. Pressed so close to him, she was surrounded by his herbal scent. A sleek hank of his hair fell over her shoulder. She wanted to finger-comb it as he had done hers, but stayed the urge for fear of being too familiar. And the notion dropped from her thoughts altogether as he nestled his hips against her and she felt him hard at the small of her back.

When he used a light touch to guide her legs, she let him plant her heels on the outsides of his calves, holding her open. His body made a comfortable cradle on the stone floor, and while she was sorry she couldn’t see his face, he put his cheek to hers and cupped both of her breasts in his palms.

He rolled the nipples, brushing the pads of his thumbs over them lightly. Ellana gave a soft moan. As a minute glow of green lit his fingertips, pleasure swamped her, sending bolts of sensation to her core.

“What was that word you used before?” Fen’Harel said.

She gave it in the common tongue of Thedas: “More.”

He dragged the tip of his long nose against her cheek, lips parted for a humid exhale. “Again.”

She murmured it as he slid one hand down her belly, toward where she most desired him. 

“How do you say that you want me to fill you?” he asked.

Heat flushed her chest where he still plied her nipple. The baseness of the request had her fumbling for any words at all. When he stopped his progress at her pubic bone, venturing no further, she whispered in the common tongue, “I want you to fill me.” A heavy pause and then: “Fen’Harel.”

He said, “That name is not so distasteful from your lips.”

It should’ve been, to Ellana. The Dread Wolf was a deceiver, the one Creator to be feared and mistrusted. Permitting him her body was a betrayal of all she had been taught; but as his hot breath grazed the tender skin of her neck and his hand went between her legs, to where she was wet with lust, she put her people’s warnings aside.

His fingers, long and wider than hers, stroked over her sex, slickening. He plied her slit, an agonizing prelude, and then, by slow inches, pressed into her. She dropped her head back against his shoulder, the intrusion a welcome stretch.

“No man has done this for you?” he asked as he caressed within her.

“No.”

“But it is not entirely new to you. You take me readily.”

Ellana shifted her hips, encouraging him deeper. “I’ve done it. To myself.” Though always away from camp and any too-keen ears.

“I see,” said Fen’Harel. As he curled his fingers, he bespelled them, sending breathtaking swells through Ellana. The muscles of her legs went taut, her toes curling.

When he began to move his hand, a steady rhythm of withdrawal and entry, he said, “You can tell me the pace you like. What feels best.” A determined press of his fingertips to a spot inside her that drew out a brazen moan. “Is that it? Tell me.”

“I c-can’t,” Ellana stuttered, broken in the ancient tongue. “The words. I can’t find them fast enough when you—” He stroked that point inside her once more, stealing the last of her coherence.

“There is only one you need say, then,” Fen’Harel told her. His lips brushed her ear as he said in the common tongue, lightly accented, “‘More.’ That I can understand. So, Ellana Lavellan, how do you like this?” He slid his fingers as deep as he could, adding a flourish of magic.

Ellana cried, “More!”

Fen’Harel gave it, taking her with his fingers in sure strokes. With his right hand, he held her breast, teasing the nipple relentlessly. He mouthed at her neck and shoulder where he could reach them, though always with lips parted, never in a kiss.

The wet sound of his work filled the shrine, accompanied by Ellana’s ragged breaths and a shattered cry for more when he increased the intensity of the magic. She grasped at his thighs as his teeth and then the tip of his tongue grazed the lobe of her ear. She jerked in response, astounded by the effect such a scant taste of her skin could have. 

The peaks of her breasts were tight and aching—between her legs, too. For as delightfully torturous as his fingers were inside her, she craved a touch at the top of her sex.

Perhaps Fen’Harel heard the plea as a silent prayer, for he employed his thumb, tingling with magic, to indulge her. Ellana cried out—maybe for more, though she doubted it was a word at all; she understood nothing but the precipitous climb to her peak.

“You smell of sweet earth,” Fen’Harel murmured, “evergreen, and desire. You are as limber as a willow branch and delicate like its leaves, but vigorous. I could not have expected you.” He nibbled on her ear again, biting down lightly on sturdy cartilage. Ellana dug her heels into the unforgiving stone, her form a bow against his.

“Garas,” he said. “Do you know this word?”

She nodded, hoping it was answer enough. She could not speak as his thumb made tight circles over her, his forefingers deep inside.

“Then do you know its meaning when I bid you ‘come?’”

She teetered at the cusp of madness, but managed to reply, “Yes. I will. I can. I—” Her inadequate vocabulary provided a desperate: “I beg you.”

Fen’Harel shuddered behind her. Taking the lobe of her ear into his mouth to suck, he sent a surge of magic through his left hand and into her.

She broke with shout, spasming around his fingers. The Veil shimmered at the edges of her vision, blurring the colors of the mosaics around them—she and Fen’Harel, in his shrine, where she made her reverence with legs spread, her arousal glistening on his palm.

He held her through the spiral down from climax, a slow return to awareness: of the coolness of the chamber and the full dark now above it; that he was dressed and she completely bare; that he was still hard against her back. She had no knowledge of a man’s cock, and certainly not a god’s, but the willingness to attend to him made a sultry weight in her lower belly. If she was the offering he required, she would not leave him unsatisfied. With intention, she pressed herself to him, subtle movements for a not-so-subtle purpose.

His hips shifted in response, but he said, “No. Not when you have never lain with a man, or for a mere lesson in conjuring a flame.”

Good sense bade Ellana stop, yet she didn’t, shifting in curious persistence. She dared to slip her hand into the soft fall of his hair where it lay across both their shoulders. He groaned, tightening his grip at her middle. The fingers of his left hand, still inside her, moved in a lazy slide. Ellana, overly sensitive there, took a sip of breath. He stilled immediately.

“I’m all right,” said Ellana, going for his wrist to spur him into motion again.

“You’re sore,” Fen’Harel said. “Or very soon will be. More would be too much.”

With a last graze of his nose to her cheek, he took his hand away and reached for the corner of the cloak to wipe her slick from it. Ellana regretted spoiling the lovely fabric when he used it to dab her clean as well. Then he carefully untangled their legs and moved away.

The fire kept off the chill of his absence as Ellana watched him collect her shirt. When he offered it to her, the fabric was dry.

“Put that on,” he said, “and we will begin your lesson.”

Ellana wasn’t wholly sure how she could muster the stamina for spellwork after what he’d just done to her, but she dutifully sat up onto her knees and pulled the shirt over her head. It was long enough to cover her to the tops of her thighs.

As Fen’Harel joined her again, she could see pink in his cheeks, the freckles made starker in the firelight. She sank her teeth into her lower lip, for she had made the Dread Wolf flush with desire.

“This,” he said, gesturing to the green-tinted flames burning at the center of the chamber, “is among the first magics children in Elvhenan learn. Light and warmth are essential protections from the elements.” A glance at the failing embers in the brazier by his stone image. “You can summon fire, but it is inelegant. And harmful, where this is not.”

Ellana flattened her left hand against her knee as he stuck his into the flames. Wonderstruck to see his skin unburned, she said, “Can I…?”

He nodded, and she put her hand tentatively in. Magic licked around it, warm and similar to the tingling of the Veil, but there was no pain.

“Incredible,” she breathed.

“It is the same strange color as any magic in this place,” Fen’Harel said. “In Arlathan, the torches burn pure white.” He looked to the mosaic, to the snowy flames the figures carried.

Ellana studied the procession of robe-draped elves, their crystal city illuminated by mage fire. “Is this what Arlathan was like?” she asked.

“‘Was?’” said Fen’Harel. “Unless it has fallen in the time I have been here, it is like this.”

Ellana touched the hem of her homespun shirt, humble and plain compared to his—as aravels were to towers in a purple sky. Such elegance was unfathomable to the Dalish. “To us it’s just a legend,” she said softly.

“If you cannot use the eluvians,” said Fen’Harel, “perhaps you cannot reach it.”

“Blood magic is forbidden in my clan. If it’s needed to use them—”

“It is not, and I have never understood it to affect travel through them. That I was brought here by your blood is…unexpected..” A slight shake of his head. “But a question for another time. The fire is our task for now.”

Ellana, realizing she’d left her hand in the comfortable heat of the flames, drew it back in surprise.

Fen’Harel withdrew his as well, though with a small bit of fire in it. “To create a true flame, as you did before, you must use magic to make energy so that it might burn, but with mage fire, you are making nothing, simply shaping the fire of magic itself.”

Ellana admired the emerald glow over his face, the gold of his piercings winking.

“It will be more difficult here,” he went on. “There is less ambient magic to manipulate, but I believe you can. Close your eyes, if you must. Concentrate on the magic around you, what seeps through the Veil without delving into it.”

So bidden, Ellana let her eyelids drop. First, as ever, she sensed the Veil, with its countless threads, looser here than in most other places. Her training had her reaching for the gaps to siphon off stronger magic from the Fade, but she checked the compulsion, instead forcing herself to feel what was already in the chamber air. It was meager compared to that on the other side of the Veil, but she envisioned gathering it like so many berries in a basket, until she could imagine a pool of it in the cup of her hand.

“Good,” said Fen’Harel, his voice distant, beyond her focus. “Now, will it into flame.”

Ellana conjured the memory of him reaching into the fire with the hand that had been inside her, appreciating the heady blend of admiration for the fire’s beauty and the vestiges of pleasure. Unaccustomed confidence welled in her, and she poured that into the magic. In a brilliant flash, it coalesced and burst to life. Ellana’s eyes snapped open to see a lively green flame dancing in her palm. As she gave a curt “Ha!” of triumph, the fire only grew.

The corners of Fen’Harel’s mouth turned up in the first earnest smile he’d favored her with. “It comes well to you. As I expected it would.”

Ellana flushed with joy, at both her success and the compliment.

“The true test, however,” Fen’Harel said, “will be if you can do it again. Put that out and try.”

Reluctant as she was to quash her first flame, Ellana did, closing her fist.

“Keep your eyes open this time,” Fen’Harel bade her. “This should be something you can do easily, in passing.” By way of demonstration, he made and extinguished a flame in scant moments.

Envy cut through Ellana, the stinging reminder of her shortcomings, but Fen’Harel was not smug Hathaan or patiently disappointed Deshanna. She had managed the mage fire adeptly, and he pushed her not out of doubt in her abilities—she hoped—but trust in them.

She held her eyes open, as ordered, even if it was more difficult to envision gathering the magic. When she had a sufficient pool of it, she willed the mage fire into being. It burned just as strong, throwing ethereal green across the pale skin of her thighs.

“Well done,” said Fen’Harel. “No novice in Elvhenan could have managed better.”

“Aren’t they children?” Ellana asked.

“Yes, but”—he surveyed her long legs, disheveled hair, and unbound breasts visible against her thin shirt—“you are not.”

Flattered as she was by his regard, she was too absorbed by the magic to blush under it. Never had any spell come so naturally to her. Even in the face of Fen’Harel’s interest, this gift of his favor meant more.

“A message,” he said, “written by mage fire can be concealed in plain sight, only visible under this flame. Look.”

Using one finger, its tip aglow, he drew a symbol on the stone before him, where it shimmered briefly before disappearing. “Your flame, Ellana.”

She brought it near the place he’d marked, and the symbol reflected her conjured light. “What does it mean?”

Fen’Harel replied, mildly beleaguered, “You do not know runes, either. So much has been neglected here. It is a word, but more as well. Give me your other hand.”

Ellana did, and he pressed it to the rune.

She started as the word was whispered in her thoughts: solas. With it came emotion, albeit not hers; sexual desire and preening self-satisfaction. She didn’t pull away, but her shock at the immediacy and potency of the feelings surely showed.

“What did you glean?” Fen’Harel asked.

“Pride,” she replied. “The word for it, and—” Her brow knitted as she sought a proper description. “A man’s pride at…giving pleasure? It was satisfying to him. He’s proud of his abilities.” Ellana’s lips parted as the realization dawned. “This is what you felt when I—” She couldn’t finish.

His smile was sly: the trickster’s mischief at last. “Mage fire script can capture much more meaning than a word alone. Would you like to try?”

“I don’t know any of the runes.”

“It does not need to be in any given language. Write one of your words. As you do, draw on your feelings in the moments when you felt them. The more vivid the emotion, the better, this first time.”

Her pleasure at his hands was certainly vivid, but she didn’t have the wherewithal to imbue anything he could sense with how powerfully he’d affected her. She had pride of her own, and those reactions to his lips at her ear, his fingers filling her, would remain private.

Calling ambient magic to her fingertip, she shaped the letters slowly, in glittering trails.

Fen’Harel wasted no time conjuring a flame to illuminate the marks. He laid his free hand over them. “Elation. Relief. Gratitude. All luminous.” He peered at the word. “What does it say?”

“Veilfire,” Ellana replied, in the common tongue. Then in the old elvhen: “People here, in our language, wouldn’t be able to understand the difference between this fire and any other. And it burns green, like the Veil…” She shrugged.

Fen’Harel traced the letters she’d written. “You were elated when you succeeded with the spell, and relieved you could, since you doubted. And grateful. To me.”

She nodded.

He rubbed the side of his head, through the hair. “I boasted in my message, and you offer me thanks.”

Ellana said hurriedly, “If I’ve offended you—”

“No,” he cut in. “There is no offense. I am honored to have inspired those feelings in you. They are more sincere than my pride.” He extinguished the fire in his hand. “It is not often I am so keenly reminded of my name.”

“Fen’Harel?” Ellana asked.

He glanced at her, an indistinguishable emotion passing through his eyes, but when he replied, it was measuredly. “I hope this ‘veilfire’ is useful to you.”

“It’s wonderful,” Ellana said. She ran her tongue under her upper lip, weighing saying more. 

Fen’Harel, folding his hands in his lap, prompted, “But?”

Ellana sighed through her nose. “But it won’t be enough to best Hathaan in the contest for First.”

“First of what?”

“The First is the Keeper’s chosen apprentice. They’ll succeed her in leading the clan and keeping its histories.”

“And you must fight for the position?” Fen'harel asked.

“Not a fight, exactly,” said Ellana. “Well, there is a portion where we spar, since a Keeper must know magic to defend the clan, but most of the trial is healing magic, sealing chests of valuables, minor enchantments. The things we need to survive.”

Fen’Harel gave a low, considering hum. “Simple magics can indeed be more valuable than shows of great power. I—and others—could use reminding of that.” He asked, “You do not believe you are skilled enough to win this contest?”

She shook her head. “Hathaan has always been better than me.”

“Do you wish to be First?”

“More than anything. The Keeper and First are honored as the clan’s mages.” And they were not turned out to fend for themselves with no connections or prospects in a shemlen world, though she did not say so aloud.

“How long before the contest is held?” Fen’Harel said.

“Three months,” Ellana replied.

He tapped his fingertips to his shin. “Hardly any time at all for mastery of the greater magics, but enough, I think, for those you need.” Ellana peered at him quizzically. He said, “You do not lack the ability to learn; you took to the veilfire quickly and well. What you require is an appropriate teacher.”

Ellana wore her astonishment plainly. “You don’t mean— You?”

“You proved a capable pupil,” he said. “Do you not want to be trained?”

“Of course, I do!” she said. “But what does it matter to you if I become First? Why would you bother?”

He sat straighter, head high like the snarling figure in stone. “Do I need to explain myself?”

“No,” said Ellana hastily. “No, you don’t.” She ducked her head in due deference. “To be First, I will offer whatever you desire, Dread Wolf.”

He didn’t reply directly, and Ellana kept her eyes downcast, waiting. The hush lay heavy between them, the Veil about their shoulders.

“Then,” he said at last, “I look forward to instructing you.”

Ellana looked up to find an oddly plaintive expression on his face. She bit her tongue against the urge to ask once more if he was certain, or if he’d realized what a mistake he was making. She said instead, “When?”

“When you are ready. I suspect you must be the one to call me here.” He frowned, a petulant wrinkle appearing above his nose. “Though I plan to investigate how it was you did so. I do not like being caught off guard.”

Ellana leashed the compulsion to beg forgiveness. She had not intended to misdirect him to a forgotten shrine, and neither did he appear to require—or even want—obeisance. She chose to be matter of fact: “I have duties to my clan. Attending to our aravels, mending clothes and leathers, foraging.” She glanced up to where the forest canopy hid the moon. “I was supposed to be hunting, and back by dark.”

Fen’Harel asked, “Will your people come looking for you, since you have not returned?”

“I don’t think they’ll notice. Not until the morning.”

Her flat tone earned another crease in his brow. “They value you so little?”

“They value what’s useful,” she said, weary. “So far, I’m not.”

Fen’Harel’s nostrils flared, his mouth set in a stern line. “They sound like slavemasters, measuring a person’s worth by their labor.” Before Ellana could protest, he raised a hand to stay her. “You are not a slave, I remember. And if you wish to return to them and be of use, I will help you.”

“Thank you,” she said.

He looked beyond the fire to the shadowy corners of the shrine. “You should not stay here tonight. It is damp and already turning cold. Is it autumn?”

“High Harvestmere,” said Ellana.

Fen’Harel sucked his teeth. “I must discover what this place is. It is beyond the edges of the empire, that much is obvious. Perhaps Vir Dirthara will hold the answers.”

Before Ellana could ask what Vir Dirthara could be, he was rising, attentive to the eluvian, ready to take his leave.

Getting to her own feet, Ellana said, “I don’t have a way out. This was a grove of trees before the roof fell in. I didn’t bring a rope.”

Fen’Harel faced her again, where she stood mostly nude by his veilfire. “It truly was chance that you found this place, and that you called me to it. I have never been presented with such a puzzle.”

“Ir ab—” Ellana started, but he cut her off: “That was not a lament. I am intrigued. I would know more of this place.” Gesturing to where her clothes lay, he said, “Dress, and I will see you out.”

She went to gather her undergarments and trousers, tugging them on while she watched Fen’Harel from the corner of her eye.

He worked a spell she’d never seen, conjuring countless fragile silver strands to twine around each other. By the time Ellana had fastened her belt, he held a loop of shimmering rope. 

“It will only last a quarter hour,” he told her, “but can bear your weight easily until then.”

Ellana hurried to sling the unused quiver across her chest. She crouched to retrieve the broken bow, its limp string stirring discontent.

“I would offer to repair it,” said Fen’Harel, “but I do not have June’s clever hand with weapons.” A tip of his head. “I could take it to him, and he can see it right.”

Clutching the ashwood—not even ironbark—Ellana said, “No, it’s too plain for a—a god to mend.”

Fen’Harel came to her, holding out his hand. “He could do with a humble task. Let me take it.”

“It’s not mine to give,” said Ellana. “I have to return it to the hunter who lent it to me.”

“In that state?”

She sighed, “He should know the truth.”

“Very well,” Fen’Harel said. “Is that all you brought with you?”

It was, but the knife she’d taken from his altar lay on the stones at her feet. He followed her gaze to where its golden hilt shone like the ring in his lip.

“That was offered to me?” he asked.

“Yes,” Ellana replied. “I’ll put it back.”

“If it is mine, then it is mine to give. Take it. It will better serve you than me sitting on an altar. Though”—wryness came into his voice—“you must be more careful with it, until I can show you how best to heal your cuts.”

Ellana found herself smiling, if only minutely. In the stories of the Dread Wolf, his trickery was malicious, his gibes at the other gods delivered cruelly. Yet, he ribbed her with a blunted edge, gentle admonishment and a promise to be true to his word—to teach her. What was so dread about him, she had not seen.

Picking up the knife, Ellana tucked it into her belt and stood to her full height. “I’ll use it to scar the trees, to find my way back here.” The Veil threads were too changeable to trust to lead her to the shrine again.

“As inelegant a solution as plain flame,” Fen’Harel said, chiding. “Mark the path with veilfire runes. You will spare the trees, and none will see the marks but you.”

Eagerness to put the new spell to work stretched the confines of Ellana’s ribs, and she nodded in assent.

“Go, then,” said Fen’Harel. “I will return the way I came. Presumably.” At a wave of his hand, the surface of the eluvian rippled and shone once more.

Before he stepped through, Ellana said, “Dareth shiral, Fen’Harel.” 

His profile backlit by the swirling light of the mirror, he replied, “Enansal, Ellana. Until we meet again.”

The veilfire he’d lit at the center of the chamber went out as he disappeared, leaving the failing luminosity of the brazier scantly reflected in the mirror’s still surface.

Ellana tied a loop into the silver rope, and it took only three tries for her to catch it on a root at the edge of the sinkhole. As Fen’Harel had assured her, it was as strong as any Dalish-made cord. Using hands and feet, she worked her way up its length, until she could heave herself up onto the forest floor.

The shrine was a near-black pit, the trees around it sentinels. Ellana chose one on which to make a crude approximation of the rune Fen’Harel had drawn, imbuing it with the bright happiness of her success—and anticipation of what more she would learn.

Laying her palm against it before the script faded, she whispered, “Solas.”

Chapter Text

While victory in the war had come at the blade of a lyrium dagger, the eluvians had played no small part in long-fought battles. They had allowed elvhen forces to cross tremendous distances, from one front to another, in moments rather than weeks of marching.

The first time Solas had passed through one of the towering mirrors, its magic had prickled his face and neck—the only places exposed by the armor he’d worn. Such sensations had still been new to him then, and he’d flinched at the strangeness. Mythal, as she’d come to call herself, had promised the distress would pass in time, but he hadn’t believed it—not when he was so uncomfortably confined by his body and assaulted at every turn by sound, touch, and taste.

She had been right, of course. The bounds—and the intriguing opportunities—of physical form had become less foreign over the centuries they’d fought the titans. Yet, Solas still marked the tingling caress of passage through any eluvian, as he had so long ago.

The wash of magic over his skin delivered him from a decrepit shrine to the lantern-lit rooms of his residence in Arlathan. It lingered in his cheeks even after the portal closed, presenting him with his reflection in the mirror. He looked much the same as he had when he’d dressed that afternoon for another of Elgar’nan’s lavish feasts, except for the slight disorder of his long hair, from delicate, feminine hands, and the creases in his muslin shirt made by the press of a lithe body against it, bunching the fabric.

Ellana Lavellan, crying out in her tongue for more as he worked his bespelled fingers inside her. The earthy scent of her dark wavy hair. Elegant pointed ears so sensitive his teeth at the lobe had made her gasp. Her overt elation at conjuring a mage’s flame, the green hue lighting high cheekbones and vallaslin at her brow. Gratitude, so earnestly offered despite how he’d drawn a self-congratulatory rune to crow over how well he’d pleasured her.

Solas. How fitting that was for what he’d done: seduced a guileless young woman to soothe his wounded pride.

The only moans he elicits are his own.

Falon’Din’s distasteful jab at the feast hadn’t by itself stung—Solas had heard worse insults in past, when he wouldn’t join the revelry—but Mythal’s minute smile, a subtle endorsement of it, had lanced him, taking the breath she’d given when she’d forged his lungs.

The cutting edges of her temper were no secret; the generals could not have won their victory without her drawing their enemies’ blood. Yet, Solas had trusted her never to turn them on her friends—on him, her companion and lieutenant.

As the others had laughed, he’d shot to his feet, upsetting an untouched wine cup to splash crimson across the remains of his meal. It would have been the opportune moment to spit some cruelty at Falon’Din in return, but instead he’d looked to Mythal, hoping to find himself mistaken in her amusement at his expense. She hadn’t spared a glance for him, having already turned to speak into Elgar’nan’s ear.

Humiliated, Solas had left the hall without a word, fleeing through the eluvian that would take him back to his residence.

But it had not.

He’d arrived in a gloomy hole in the ground devoted to, of all accursed things, the Dread Wolf. Another of Elgar’nan’s barbs: a mocking play on Solas’s taciturn temperament and the form he could take on the battlefield. To Solas’s dismay, it had stuck, spreading among the armies, until a fearsome reputation preceded him.

“A place of honor for a god,” he said, Ellana’s words acrid in his mouth. How the others would relish that title, and how he despised it.

Until it served his purposes.

Solas pushed a hand through his hair, grasping it at the back of his head and pulling until a few strands snapped.

When Ellana had called him Fen’Harel with trembling reverence, he had not corrected her, instead stepping into the role. Not immediately, since her hand had needed healing and he had been confounded by the stifling shroud she called the Veil, but he’d readily taken the opportunity to lay his palm on her chest under the pretense of gauging her ability with magic. Unneeded; he could have done so from ten paces.

Her heartbeat had quickened under his hand, the modest swell of her breasts soft and enticing at the heel. When he’d worked his forefinger through the laces of her shirt to stroke flushed skin, she had made a just-audible sound, and his path had been decided.

He would prove Falon’Din wrong by drawing the sound out again. Mythal’s smile and Elgar’nan’s aspersions that he was unskilled would fade, for how he would employ his hands and his magic to make Ellana Lavellan moan.

And she had, uninhibited and throaty between panted breaths, her bare body shifting and arching to seek all that he gave—more than intended. His plan, for all it could be called that, had been to lay her down on his cloak and make quick work of it, but her response had come startlingly strong; more affecting than Solas had any right to expect. When her legs had fallen open and he’d dipped into her hot slickness, keeping a distance had become impossible. He’d needed to hold her, to feel her against him as she shook and clenched tight around his fingers.

Solas yanked at his hair again, a reprimand and check for his lust.

There was no denying she had been glorious in the throes, or that he had reveled in his triumph as she’d begged him for release, but in the aftermath, when she had so eagerly put desire aside to conjure a mage’s flame—veilfire, as she called it—her girlish joy had opened a pit of anguish in Solas’s middle. He had misused her for his own edification; a willing body to dally with and discard, as he’d accused June of at the feast.

Ellana was not a slave, however. At least Solas was granted that small mercy. But he had still taken advantage of her yearning to wield magic and her awe of the Dread Wolf, demanding an “offering,” of which he was now sickeningly ashamed.

Releasing his hair, he shouted his frustration into the empty room.

The bark of his voice brought hurried footfalls from deeper inside the residence, followed by three raps on the door and a familiar question: “Solas, are you all right?”

“Yes,” he replied, sharp enough to make him wince. His temper had gotten the better of him once tonight; he would not permit it again. Taking a breath, he said measuredly: “Come in, Felassan.”

His dark-haired adjutant slipped into the room, attire fitted and tidy, like he was still a soldier awaiting his general’s orders. Ever-observant eyes appraised Solas’s rumpled appearance and the color surely up in his face.

“What did they do this time?” Felassan asked, expression set.

Solas gave a weary chuckle. His friend had seen him return from so many of Elgar’nan’s gatherings in ill humor that it was safe to guess the generals had inspired this one. “Nothing beyond the expected.” He ignored the throbbing wound Mythal had given him.

Felassan’s stern regard didn’t waver. “Then what were you shouting about loud enough that I heard it from across the house?”

Going to an armchair by the hearth, Solas sat and rubbed along his forehead. Too late, he realized he used the left fingers, which had been between Ellana Lavellan’s legs. He snapped the hand away from his face, curling it around his knee.

“Have you ever known an eluvian to lead someone astray?”

Felassan’s thick eyebrows rose. “Never. A pair is linked and lead only to one another. Or so June always told us.”

“Indeed,” said Solas without elaborating.

Felassan knew him too well to be deterred. “Did that happen to you? Just now?”

Solas nodded. “I came from the banquet hall, but not directly. I was diverted first to another place entirely.”

“Where?” Felassan asked.

“I do not know, and therein lies half the quandary.”

“Only half?”

Solas bit at the gold ring in his lower lip, a tic when he was weighing what to say or do. “I have reason to believe I may have been summoned by a blood magic spell.”

Felassan set balled fists on his narrow hips. “Is that possible?”

Solas said once again, “I do not know, but after tonight I have no desire to speak to June about it.”

“Something did happen at the feast,” Felassan grumbled.

Solas waved him off, in no mood to recount it. “I must go to Vir Dirthara and hope my answers lie there.”

As he went to rise, Felassan stepped into his path. “Tomorrow. It’s after midnight.”

Solas cast a glance toward the balcony, where the doors stood open to a starlit sky. “But I was there an hour, two at the most. How can it have been so long?”

“Who’s to know, if it’s blood magic that was used,” said Felassan darkly. “Did you find anyone there? Someone who cast the spell?”

The warm metal of the lip ring clicked against Solas’s upper teeth, and Felassan gave a grunt of annoyance.

“You would not have mentioned it at all, if you didn’t wish to tell me. You can keep secrets from others, Solas, but not from me.”

Leaning his head back against the chair, Solas conceded. “A woman. She spilled blood on an altar…to Fen’Harel.”

Felassan’s chin lifted by a hairsbreadth, enough for Solas to mark the approval. Veneration of the Dread Wolf, and the power he’d wielded during the war, did not sit as uneasily with him as it did with Solas.

“It was not intentional,” Solas went on. “She cut her finger on a blade she found there. After falling through the roof of the place.” One side of his mouth curved upward as he recalled her moue of displeasure when he’d drawn a bifurcated pine needle from her hair. It had been churlish and charming at once.

“And you believed that?” said Felassan.

“Lying to a god would not come easily to her, I think,” Solas replied.

Felassan didn’t argue. Never once in the centuries he’d served Mythal, and thereby Solas, had he questioned an order.

“All right,” he said. “So she did not mean to do it, but she drew you to her all the same.”

“Perhaps it was the place I was drawn to,” said Solas, “not Ellana.”

Felassan blinked once. “A pretty name, though not one I have heard before.”

“Nor I,” Solas said. “None of the names she told me I recognized. Have you heard of a place called the Free Marches?” It was awkward to say, so much less fluid than his language.

“Never,” Felassan replied. “Is that even Elvhen?”

Solas shook his head. “She spoke it, though not fluently.”

Upon his arrival in the shrine, his fury had burned hot at finding himself so far from his intended destination, but Ellana’s heavily accented entreaty to speak slowly had diverted his anger. He’d regained the presence of mind to take in his surroundings, her most especially. Tall and long-limbed, disheveled from the fall he hadn’t yet known about, and with a spark of ire at his calling her da’len, she’d stirred a dangerous appetite.

“Then,” Felassan said, “she cannot be of the People.”

“But she was,” said Solas. “Everything about her, save the name and language, was elvhen.” His memory provided vivid proof: Ellana standing nude before crackling veilfire, washed in its verdant glow. When she had turned to face him, her vallaslin stark against a creamy complexion, his blood had surged.

Felassan worked his jaw. “Does Mythal know that there are others beyond the empire? Does Elgar’nan?”

“No,” Solas replied. “She would have told me.”

“Of course,” said Felassan, though he averted his eyes. 

Solas sat forward in the chair, elbows on his thighs. “There is more. Wherever the shrine lies, it is smothered by a spellwork barrier Ellana called the ‘Veil.’”

He shuddered to think of the awful mutedness, and Ellana’s description of the Veil’s purpose had done nothing to ease the discomfort. She’d claimed it protected her land from demons and dangerous magic in the “Fade,” another thing Solas had no concept of. Magic was everywhere in Elvhenan. It infused all, physical or spirit-made. It could be treacherous, as he’d told her, but never so much that it had to be sealed away.

Grief caught in his throat at how difficult it had been for her to work magic through the barrier. Had she been born in Arlathan, her potential would have been seen in infancy and cultivated throughout her youth. None of the world-born had the power Solas and the other spirit-born did, but Ellana’s was not insignificant. That she had been unable to conjure a mere mage’s flame was an affront to her gifts.

“What does it mean?” Felassan asked.

“I did not ask the direct translation,” Solas replied, “because I do not think she knew it, but it is like a cloak over all things, dampening their magic. I would have studied it more, had she not offered—”

He cut himself off, prompting Felassan to ask, “What?”

Solas bit down hard enough on the ring in his lip to spark pain, swallowing down what he’d meant to say: herself. Had she not offered herself to him.

Shame reared its head again, redoubled at the prospect of confessing to Felassan what he’d done. Around the chokehold, he said, “Had I not offered to teach her a spell. But I intend to investigate more of this Veil. At the library. Tomorrow.”

Felassan, no fool, recognized an evasion, but knew better than to force Solas to explain—at that moment, anyway. A tactician, he would wait for the right opening and then pounce.

“Do you want me to go with you?” he said coolly.

“No,” said Solas. “I would not inconvenience you.”

Felassan huffed through his nose. “Very well, but tell me this: if the books do not bear out, will you seek to return there?”

Solas considered lying, or at least attempting to blunt the truth, but doubted Felassan would be convinced by either. “I already plan to.” He omitted, however, that it would be at Ellana’s behest—unless he could uncover in Vir Dirthara how to force an eluvian to take him to her. His molars itched with the need to start in on the research, but Felassan was right: he would do better to traverse the Crossroads in the morning.

“Will she be there?” his friend asked. “Ellana.”

“Yes,” Solas replied. Felassan’s nostrils flared, as if scenting a threat. Solas went on, lightly admonishing, “She can do me no harm. Her magic is limited.”

“By the Veil?”

“And poor training.” Which he had agreed to remedy as her tutor: an offering of his own, as recompense for his misuse of her.

More too, he had taken umbrage at the way she’d spoken of her people’s disregard for her. They value what’s useful, she’d told him, her delight from his lesson dimming to sorrow. So far, I’m not.

Solas’s stomach had turned with contempt. Such measures of a person’s worth smacked of slavery, for all she claimed she was not one, and that he could not abide. If his knowledge could help her, he would give it freely.

“If she had a knife,” said Felassan, drawing Solas back to Arlathan, “she can still stab you.”

Pushing himself up from the chair, Solas touched Felassan’s shoulder. “Go back to bed, my friend. If I travel there again and return with a dagger in my back, you can scold me then.”

Resigned, Felassan nodded and took his leave.

Alone once more, Solas felt the tendrils of misgiving return to tighten in his chest. Felassan’s fussing was unnecessary; Ellana was no danger to him. He to her, however…

To be First, I will offer whatever you desire, Dread Wolf.

He had maintained outward equanimity when she’d spoken those words, but inside a ravenous beast had slavered. It still did, as recollections rose unbidden: her silken flesh; the weight of her breasts in his palms; the sweet sounds she’d made when he worried one nipple and then the other; how, on the heels of her climax, she’d moved to tease his cock where it was nestled at her lower back, agonizingly hard.

In the millennia since Mythal had put his spirit into a body, he’d learned to manage its requirements. Food, water, exercise, even sex, were, more often than not, matters of maintenance. But in that moment, when Ellana Lavellan had pressed herself to him, the searing need put her on her back, knock her lean thighs apart, and bury himself inside her had been urgent—visceral. More so than the partners he’d had before, with whom he’d discovered the most enjoyable aspects of physical form. Yet, he hadn’t dared give in to it; not when Ellana had never lain with a man.

Solas ground his teeth. His body still hummed with the pressing need for release that, if not granted, would leave him aching through the night.

It would be suitable penance for his misdeeds, he supposed, but the hasty strokes of his own hand would appease the beast, and when next he found himself in the wolf’s shrine, Ellana would be spared his attentions.

Unless she wanted them, a traitorous element within him ventured. She had, after all, looked wounded when he’d told her he would not ask for everything she might’ve offered.

You don’t want to lie with me?

He had, powerfully, but she thought him a god to whom she was beholden, and he could not leverage that for his own gain.

Taut as a bowstring, Solas stalked back to the chair and dropped heavily into it. He tugged at the laces of his trousers until he could free his cock. The relief of the first stroke was exultant. With hope, Felassan had already reached his room; otherwise he might’ve heard Solas’s long groan.

Despicable as it was, he conjured Ellana. In his mind’s eye, he watched her undress for him in the firelight, damp clothes methodically peeled away to reveal the places he would soon touch—and could imagine tasting. He wished he’d put his fingers into his mouth after he’d drawn them out of her. Surely, she would have been musky and slick on his tongue. Could she have risen to him again, had he lain between her thighs and licked her greedily?

He grimaced at the dry strokes of his hand, yearning for Ellana’s slippery heat. Or her mouth. How fine her unruly hair would be in his grip as she swallowed him. His hips jerked into his own grasp, testicles drawing up as he neared his peak. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d managed it so quickly.

I want you, Ellana had said, airy as she’d grasped his wrist to hold his fingers to her breast, to teach me.

Magic, she’d meant, but Solas’s lust-bound thoughts latched onto all the other things he could teach, none of them spells.

As he broke, spilling over his fingers, he found a single word in her language. In it was the raw truth: he wanted more of Ellana Lavellan.

Chapter Text

Warm breath puffed the nape of Ellana’s neck, a curious velvet nose snuffling at the collar of her shirt. She ducked away from the ticklish investigation, earning a snort from the yearling halla stood behind her, its horns just beginning to twist. She wrinkled her own nose at it. “I don’t have any treats, you greedy thing. Go bother someone else.”

The elder halla she groomed gave a nostril-flapping exhale, though Ellana couldn’t decide which of the two youths he was most annoyed with: the demanding yearling or the testy mage. Ellana, for her part, made an apology with a long stroke of the brush along the halla’s sleek side. He nestled contentedly in the long grass beyond the clan’s encampment, where the herd grazed in afternoon sunshine dappled through orange and brown leaves.

Ellana had spent the better part of the day tending to him and his fellows, a duty never given as punishment, for the halla were trusted friends to be cared for, and yet rarely handed to a single person—unless they needed to be put out of sight for a time. In her twenty years, Ellana had gotten to know the herd well.

She’d returned to camp from Fen’Harel’s shrine after the evening cookfire coals had been banked. She’d made straight for Glynnin, the hunter whose bow she’d broken. Twice widowed, both in childbed, he slept every night under the sky, regardless of the weather and farthest flung from the aravels in which the families stayed.

Ellana had found him seated on a crate by a small campfire of his own, sharpening one of his fileting knives, the blade thin but razor-sharp. Though not quite old enough to have fathered her, he’d left youth behind for a wiry, sun-worn frame and a complexion puckered with scarring—the wrong side of a wyvern, or so the story went. When Ellana had stopped before him with the ruined recurve in her grasp, he had not immediately looked up from his work.

“Ir abelas, lethallin,” she had said sorrowfully. “I was careless with what’s yours. I fell.”

The blade of his knife had rasped against the whetstone uninterrupted. “Must’ve been some fall, to rend that ashwood so. Were you not injured?”

Ellana had shaken her head.

“Good luck, then.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s good luck you returned unscathed. A bow can be remade. You cannot. Set it down and I’ll find a purpose for the wood, even if it’s kindling.”

Ellana had done as she was told, laying the bow at his feet.

“The Keeper will have to hear about the loss, of course,” Glynnin had said, “but not until morning.” Turning canny brown eyes up at Ellana at last, he’d added, “I’ll tell her you’ll take my turn seeing to the halla.”

It was far from adequate recompense for his bow, and an undeserved kindness—helping her to dodge Deshanna’s censure—but Ellana had said all the same, “It shall be done.”

An insistent bleat came from across the meadow, drawing her attention and that of the elder halla. His soft, oval ears pricked at a baby’s distress.

“I’ll get her,” Ellana said, patting him in reassurance as she got to her feet. The yearling, finally accepting he wasn’t going to be fed, pranced off in the opposite direction.

Another bleat set Ellana on the path of the little one. It had likely fallen asleep after nursing and its mother had ambled on, chewing the seeded heads of the long grass. She would come for it in time, but Ellana had keener eyes and a greater height to see by. Finding the leggy baby curled in the shadow of a stone figure proved no trouble.

“Easy now, da’len,” said Ellana, crouching next to the shivering baby. “You’re perfectly safe. Just a bit turned around. Here, up you go to have a look.” Lifting the tiny halla by its chest, she pointed it in the direction of the herd. Its stubby tail waggled happily as it sighted them. Giving a giddy bleat, it charged off toward a female, her coat shining with health and recent brushing.

Ellana didn’t watch their reunion, her gaze going instead to the statue beside her: the likeness of an attentive wolf. It was barely a quarter the size of the figure in the shrine, and far less skillfully made, but more familiar to her. Everywhere the clan wandered, they brought four stone wolves, setting them in each of the cardinal directions to watch the approaches to their camp—and to remind them to always be wary of deception, from without or within.

Setting her hand atop its head, she felt the worn surface, stippled by exposure to the elements. It both was and wasn’t meant to be Fen’Harel—the Dalish didn’t look at every wolf and see the Betrayer—but hard stone under her fingertips conjured the slabs she’d lain upon in the shrine, bare and brazen, as he had made her wild with spellwork, then touch.

A long morning grooming halla alone had afforded her ample time to try—and fail—to reconcile the man with the tales. None were told of the Dread Wolf’s desires, or of any lovers at all. For all his tricks and lies, he had never used seduction to torment the other gods. And neither was he described as a figure to be desired, always in shadow or fearsome lupine form. The golden-headed elf garbed a gauzy shirt and fitted trousers that did nothing to hide his arousal was a far cry from that.

Blood sank from Ellana’s belly between her legs—and not for the first time since she’d left the shrine. Indeed, she’d slept poorly in the night, her dreams disappointing echoes of pleasure. Even as she’d imagined Fen’Harel’s fingers inside her, the warm gold of the ring in his lip at her ear, she couldn’t reach her peak. She’d woken slick and flushed with unfulfilled want at dawn. Had the hunters with whom she shared an aravel not been sleeping nearby, she would’ve dipped her own fingers in for some semblance of relief. But instead, she’d quickly dressed, washed her face in a bucket of cold water, grabbed a round of bread and a hunk of cheese, and sought her duty to the halla.

Keeping her hands busy had been a boon, yet now that she was at a distance from camp and in the company of only the wolf statue, temptation niggled at the base of her spine, coiling toward her center. It wouldn’t take long. She could sit at the wolf’s paws, somewhat concealed, slip her trousers down, and bring herself off before anyone was the wiser.

It would be a poor imitation of what Fen’Harel had done to her, however, and as much as she craved release, she yearned more his hands. Tonight. She would to return to the shrine after supper, when she would not be missed; for a lesson in magic, yes, but also for the requisite offering in exchange for his knowledge.

She pressed her thighs together against the ache of lust. Perhaps a quick touch. Just enough to tide her over—

“Ah, here you are!”

Startled, she turned to find Hathaan, her fellow apprentice mage, standing with hands on hips, five paces behind the statue. From the bullish pose, he had not just arrived.

“The Keeper taught you better than to skulk around without announcing yourself,” Ellana said, prickly.

“And she taught you better than to avoid her,” said Hathaan.

For a moment, they regarded each other at a disgruntled impasse, but Hathaan’s rigid shoulders gave as he said, “Glynnin wasn’t even upset when he came to breakfast. The wood can be repurposed easily, he said. What’s the worst that could’ve happened? A stern look from the Keeper? But you ran off like a scolded child to hide here”—a glance at where her hand still rested on the stone wolf’s head—“in strange company.”

Ellana didn’t withdraw from the statue. Her thumb moved between the wolf’s ears. “Did she send you to find me?”

“No. Glynnin told us where you’d be. The Keeper expected you’d come to her when you were ready.”

“Then what are you doing here?” asked Ellana.

He frowned. “You know how Deshanna gets when you’re sulking. She mourns, Creators only know why. She won’t be better until you speak with her. I’m tired of watching that.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “She tolerates too much, if you ask me.”

“I didn’t,” said Ellana sharply.

“A Keeper can’t hide from their responsibilities,” Hathaan said, “and neither can the First.”

Ellana heard the implication clearly: that she was fit for neither role. She bit out, “And you’d never do that, of course.”

“Maybe when I was a little boy,” he said, “but now? I know what’s expected of me.” He shook his head. “Sometimes I think you don’t want to be First. You could try harder than you do.”

“So you can feel better about it when you best me?” she said. “That it was a hard fight for clever Hathaan to earn his place as First?”

He gave her a dark look, and she knew she’d hit him in the soft meat. Caressing the wolf’s head, she sought the ambient magic of the meadow and in the stone, drawing it just at the cusp of summoning veilfire. She tamped down the urge, unwilling to show her hand. Stepping up to Hathaan, fingers still humming with latent power, she said, “If it’s a fight you want, you’ll have it.”

She stalked past him to gather the leather satchel of brushes and with it slung over her shoulder, set back to camp.

The Keeper’s aravel was no larger than any other, but its adornments of glittering tokens and draped fabrics—all gifts for her services to the clan—stood out. Ellana had grown up in its shadow, bits of colored glass tinkling in the breeze lulling her in many a childhood nap, when spells had worn her out.

Deshanna Istimaethoriel Lavellan, her hair iron gray and vallaslin distorted by the wrinkles of age, sat on a stool with a mortar and pestle braced between knobby knees. As Ellana approached, she dropped a handful of elfroot leaves into the mortar and set to grinding them in practiced twists of her wrist.

“Hahren,” said Ellana by way of greeting.

“Bring me that embrium,” the Keeper said, indicating the basket of orange flowers with a tip of her head. It was well within her reach, but the command was for Ellana’s benefit: a reminder of her authority over an apprentice.

Ellana dropped two blooms into the mortar, and Deshanna hummed approval. At least she could remember the proportions.

“How fare the halla?” Deshanna asked.

“Hale and well,” said Ellana, a customary reply. “Only one baby got lost in the grass. I saw her back to her mother.”

“You’re good with them.”

No better than anyone else in the clan, but Ellana didn’t say so. Instead: “Is there something I can help with?”

“Narine brought her pedant to have the enchantment refreshed.”

Ellana’s heart clenched. The spell in a teardrop chip of pewter was the only thing that fended off the seizing fits Narine had suffered all her life. Ellana had been five or six when she’d seen one for the first time. Narine’s eyes had rolled back, showing the whites, moments before she’d collapsed. Her bondmate had run to hold her as her muscles spasmed, putting his belt between her teeth. When the fit had passed, Ellana had seen dozens of deep grooves in the leather. The enchantment was a Creator-sent blessing, as long as it was done correctly.

“It’s just there,” Deshanna said, pointing. “You remember the spell?”

“I do.” Ellana collected the pendant, hanging from a leather cord, and held it in her palm. Such a small thing, and a smaller magic, but apprehension welled in her—that she wouldn’t be able to manage even that.

“Atish’an, da’len,” said the Keeper. “You can do it.”

Ellana tried to be grateful for Deshanna’s attempt to soothe, yet irritation at the endearment rose like hackles. Her reaction to it had been the same with Fen’Harel, though unlike the Keeper, he had been quick to amend it. And what had followed had made it abundantly clear he did not regard her as anything less than a woman.

Desire sparked unbidden, cutting through her fear and doubt. At the periphery of her vision, she caught a flash of green: a pulsating Veil thread. Quick as a cat, she followed it to a gap in the barrier and guided strong magic to infuse the pendant. The pewter grew hot against her skin, for a heartbeat enveloped in a flare of veilfire. Then it was gone, but the pendant felt weightier in the aftermath.

When she gave it to Deshanna to inspect, surprise lit her weathered face. “A sound enchantment. Your best in a long while. Well done, Ellana.”

Ellana’s pride shone. She could almost see it take the shape of the rune Fen’Harel had drawn: solas. 

“I’m glad, hahren,” she said, “if it will help Narine.”

“I have no doubt it will. I’ll bring it to her this afternoon, and return with her thanks.” Deshanna tucked the pendant into the pocket of her shirt. “There is more to be done, if you’ve the strength for it.”

Ellana narrowly avoided flinching, though it was true her meager well of power had, in the past, been exhausted quickly. Imbuing the pendant with so much could have drained it, yet Ellana felt no weariness. If anything, her sense of the ambient magic around her, of the Veil, and of what lay behind it was greater. 

“I’m ready,” she said to the Keeper.

The tasks would be a welcome distraction from the wait for night, for if one lesson from Fen’Harel could give her such strength, she was hungry to discover what more his favor could bestow.

Wherever the clan ventured, they brought with them a slab of wood as wide as Ellana’s arm span and twice her height. Cut from a great tree in Tirashan Forest, its surface had been planed smooth, but the edges were natural, rough bark forever sealed under shining lacquer. At the center of each encampment, ten hunters would place it atop sturdy legs and all would be welcome to gather around it for a shared evening meal.

Not everyone did on every evening, since overnight sojourns kept some hunters away, bonded couples wished to enjoy their privacy, and others, like Glynnin, simply preferred their own cookfires. But the Keeper was always present, and after supper was finished, she recounted one of the clan’s many histories.

As an apprentice, Ellana was more often than not at the table, though more for the stories than the food. A First had to inscribe the histories upon their heart, as they were upon the Keeper’s, so none of the clan’s memories would be lost. Since girlhood, Ellan had loved listening to Deshanna’s lilting alto, pauses for breath perfectly placed in a captivating cadence; but on this night, rather than sitting to listen, she slipped away from the table as the Keeper began. The story held the clan rapt, and none marked her departure.

She gave the halla a wide berth as she left the encampment, moving silently toward the haven of the forest’s shadows. Only when she was concealed by thick trunks did she dare to cup her hand and ignite a flame to light the way. The veilfire caught the shimmer of the mark she’d made on a tree the night before—the last then, but the first signpost now, guiding her back to Fen’Harel’s shrine.

Crudely drawn arrows, they winked into sight when she passed and then disappeared beyond the luminosity of the veilfire. The sign of solas stopped her before she ventured too far into the trees encircling the shrine’s black pit. Taking a rope from over her shoulder, she secured it to the rune-marked trunk and tossed the free end into the jagged maw of the shrine. Rougher than the spellwork cord Fen’Harel had fashioned for her, it abraded her hands as she moved down it in small intervals, until her bare feet met cool stone.

In the confines of the shrine, the Veil was a tangible presence, especially at the tips of her ears; a wraithlike imitation of Fen’Harel’s blunt teeth when he’d nipped them. Ellana shivered, excitement a tremor all the way down to the her toes, and lit another flame in her hand.

Mosaic tiles glinted with her progress toward the braziers, where they stood on either side of the altar. What little fuel had lain in them before had turned to ash, but when she willed the free-flowing magic that filled the shrine to coalesce, both filled with leaping veilfire, brightening and heating the small room.

Ellana went to the altar itself, the wolf statue’s nose at the level of hers. Among the ancient offerings, she recognized five red drops, now dry: her blood, mistakenly spilled. From her belt, she drew the golden-hilted blade. She’d fastidiously cleaned it that afternoon with polish and whetstone, and it shone like the day it was forged. She brought it to her palm, the deadly edge gleaming, only for dismay to twinge between her ribs.

The Keeper had warned of the perils of blood magic from the earliest days of Ellana’s training. It held power, but a tainted brand, stolen with each cut to supple skin. Those admonitions had been for taking another’s blood, never giving one’s own. Was it the same grave transgression to cut her hand?

No more so than what she employed the blood for, she suspected. Deshanna—all her people, in fact—would implore her not to be so foolhardy as to seek the Dread Wolf. He could not be trusted, nor his teachings. Fen’Harel ma ghilana they said when a person was set to make a poor choice—one that might well end in disaster. Perhaps this would, whether Ellana was deceived by Fen’Harel or discovered turning to blood magic to give her the advantage over Hathaan; but last night the Dread Wolf had given her reason to hope she could be more than an unremarkable mage, and that was worth the risk.

“Fen’Harel ir ghilana,” she murmured and drew the knife across her palm.

Dark blood welled immediately. Ellana extended her hand over the wolf’s paws, dribbling red in a grim puddle—more than it had taken to wake the eluvian before. She watched it where it stood behind the figure of the wolf, growing troubled when it remained unchanged. Fen’Harel himself had not understood what magic was at work, and for all Ellana knew, it could be activated only at the waxing moon, or on one autumn day of the year. Grimacing, she clenched her fist and the blood ran faster.

It gleamed like quicksilver when, at last, the eluvian lit, the shrine’s reflection consumed by rippling energy. A shadow filled the arch and then stepped free of it.

He wore a cambric shirt, the sleeves bunched at his elbows, with a high-collared vest, three buttons undone. His hair had been plaited tight against his head, the long tail absently tied with string where it hung at the middle of his back. His feet were wrapped with strips of leather laced up his ankles, and he carried a bound volume at his left side. Taken together, he cut more a figure of a scholar than a god, down to the assessing crease in his brow and the scent of old paper that came with him through the eluvian, before it sealed itself again.

Around the lightheadedness of pain, Ellana greeted him, “Andaran atish’an, Fen’Harel.”

He halted just past the altar, head coming up like a hound on alert. The fingers of his free hand glowed with a reflexive defense spell.

“Peace!” Ellana said again, more urgently. She had no doubt he could strike her dead with a careless flick of one finger.

His eyes, blue and alert, landed on her, and slowly—too slowly for Ellana’s racing pulse—the magic faded. “So,” he said, “I am come again, after all.” 

The fluidity of his voice was a fine thing, so unlike her people’s plodding attempts at the ancient Elvhen. Ellana nearly tripped over her tongue as she said, “Forgive me, if this time was wrong to…ask you here.”

Fen’Harel made no reply to that, saying instead, “You are bleeding,” as he crossed the distance between them and took hold of her hand. The cut stung when he unfurled her fist to see it smeared with red.

“What have you done?” he said, tight with disapproval.

“What I had to,” Ellana replied. “The altar. For you.”

His hard expression did not give. “This is excessive. For whatever magic it is, so much could not be needed.” Ellana hissed as he pressed the pad of his thumb near the cut, and immediately his grip eased. “Ir abelas,” he said, gentler. “Come, sit. I will heal you.”

Ellana followed his gaze to where a length of worn cloth lay on the flagstones. For a moment, she thought it the abandoned altar covering, but it was too large and the color, while faded, too bold for a shrine vestment.

“Your cloak,” she said to Fen’Harel. “You must have left it last night. But”—she took in the holes and fraying edges, tattered as if by time and hard wear—“how is it ruined?”

His regard, heavy with bemusement, shifted back to her. “Last night? Do you mean it has only been one day here?”

Ellana, her confusion a match for his, nodded.

“It has been three weeks in Arlathan,” he said.

“Weeks?” said Ellana, half-whispered in disbelief.

It was his turn to nod. “And I have spent nearly all of them scouring Vir Dirthara for any explanation, but there was nothing about it or about this place. No Free Marches or Wycome. No Veil and no Fade. I thought perhaps I had dreamed it—such a muted world—but it is real. You are real, Ellana Lavellan.”

She felt his attention like a brush to the cheek, and her lips parted on an inhale. Perhaps it was a play of veilfire glow, but she was certain she saw his eyes gleam violet.

It vanished quickly, however, as his thumb shifted against her hand, sticky with drying blood. Saying once more, “Come,” he drew her to the ruined cloak, and they knelt across from one another.

The wound on Ellana’s palm was not as deep as the one she’d accidentally inflicted on her fingertip, but it was longer and hurt equally as much. Fen’Harel inspected it, cradling her hand in both of his. The basket of his elegant fingers was warm, his fingernails trimmed, rounded, and clean.

Ellana had scrubbed her own nails with a brush before supper, crouched by the bucket of cold water she’d used to wash the rest of her body. It wasn’t a proper bath, but she’d refused to come to the shrine—to Fen’Harel—with the grime of the day on her skin.

“This may sting,” he said, indicating the cut, “though if you can tolerate doing the damage, mending it should be no trouble.”

Ellana heard the chiding in his tone, but disregarded it to ask, “Can you show me how? I know a few healing spells, but—”

“Your first application of new magics should not be on yourself.”

Frowning, Ellana grumbled, “My Keeper says the same.”

“She is the most learned mage of your clan?” Fen’Harel asked. At Ellana’s nod, he continued, “Then her teachings are sound. I will instruct you after this has been seen to.”

The bite of censure in that had Ellana deferring with a duck of her head. 

There was a pause, and then Fen’Harel sighed softly. “Look at me, Ellana.” She did, finding the reproachful drawing-in of his eyebrows had eased. “I am not practiced in teaching—magic or otherwise—and can be…terse, but I do not wish you to cower from me.” He stroked his thumb along her hand, her blood staining the whorls in his skin, as it would an ordinary man’s. “Allow me to tend to you, and then we will make a lesson of it. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” Ellana said.

Fen’Harel turned to her hand. His lit with magic, and Ellana felt the uncomfortable tug of her flesh being sutured.

To distract herself, she asked, “What is Vir Dirthara?” She knew the words—way of learning—but he spoke of it as a place, not a pursuit.

“The great library of Elvhenan. It contains all our knowledge, our histories, the memories of the People who have gone into the long sleep. It is a wondrous place, where you can lose yourself in all that you do not know.”

Ellana had heard of the libraries in human cities, where books painstaking written by scholars and Chantry sisters sat on dusty shelves. The idea of marking history down and then tucking it away to be forgotten sat ill with her; Dalish memories were ever-living in the Keeper’s recounting. Surely the Creators did the same. Yet, the book Fen’Harel had brought with him through the eluvian sat at the edge of the altar, proof to the contrary.

“Are all your histories written?” she asked.

“A great deal of them,” said Fen’Harel. “What is not is sustained as memory in vessels or pools.”

Ellana tried to imagine such a thing—how one might discover a memory in a bucket—and could not. “Were you there, at Vir Dirthara, before you came here?”

“Yes,” he said with an edge of consternation. “All afternoon, and into the night. I was passing through the eluvian that would take me home to rest, but it seems other plans had been laid.”

Fighting a hasty battle with the urge to apologize and thankfully coming out victorious, Ellana asked, “Was there anything different about it? Going through that eluvian?”

“None,” Fen’Harel said. “It felt as it always does: a tingle over the skin, coolness rather than heat.”

Ellana encountered something akin to that in her hand as he said it: the work of his spell, nearly finished with the cut.

“In those first days after my coming here,” he went on, “I considered each time I ventured through an eluvian that I might be delivered back, but after three weeks it seemed unlikely.”

Was it disappointment Ellana heard in those words? She couldn’t be sure, and couldn’t fathom how she might ask after it—not without making a fool of herself hoping he had been half as eager as she for them to meet again.

“There,” he said as the glow around their hands went out. On her palm was a pink line no thicker than the other creases. “It will not scar this time, but do not do it again.” He released her to gesture for the knife where it lay on the cloak at her side. “Give me your blade.”

She offered it by the hilt.

Fen’Harel took it and pressed his forefinger to the knife’s tip. The skin broke as he spun it, a drop of blood springing forth. “This should be sufficient in the future.”

Ellana said nothing, fixated on the dome of red as it gave and slid past the first knuckle. The lifeblood of a god. She never would’ve dreamed a Creator could bleed.

Taking the tattered fabric of the cloak, Fen’Harel wiped the knife’s blade, then dabbed his finger clean.

“Do you need healing?” Ellana said. “I can manage something small like that.”

He asked in reply, “When is a wound too great for you to mend?”

Ellana contemplated her hand. “I could have done this, but not the deeper wounds, where muscle or bone has to be knitted. Even the Keeper struggles with those. I could never—” 

“Not never,” said Fen’Harel. “Not yet.” Steel flashed as he put the knife to his upturned palm. Ellana cried “No!” too late; he had sliced the skin deeper than she had done hers. “It is all right,” he said. “You can mend it. I will show you how.” He proffered the damaged hand and Ellana curled her shaking ones around it. A runnel of blood, pooling so quickly, escaped and dribbled hot on her skin.

“For this, you will need greater power than what exists on this side of your Veil,” Fen’Harel told her. “You are practiced in seeking that?”

“Yes,” she said, thinking of the enchantment she had done on the pendant that afternoon—when her desire for him had made the threads of the Veil all the more prominent. Now that he was here, she could feel it around them, as aware of his presence as she.

“Then draw your Fade to the cut,” he said. “Can you sew?”

“Like stitches?” Ellana asked.

“Very close. But even the best stitches with needle and thread are leagues wider than those you must make with this magic. Imagine drawing a thousand stitches shut at once and sealing them tight. Can you do that?”

“I think so.”

“Do not be afraid of hurting me,” he said, as if he’d heard the stirrings of her nerves. “I have had far worse than novice attempts at healing.”

Ellana itched to know what that meant. When had he been injured? Did gods have accidents, or had there been a battle? He would have been resplendent in armor, with his steely countenance and set shoulders. She would’ve shuddered to see him so, albeit not wholly from fear.

“Ellana,” he said, recalling her to her task.

She took a sure hold of him and, breathing in, sought the Fade. It came to her readily, as it had earlier in the day, but rather than pouring the magic into a dead chunk of pewter, she strove to smooth it with care over the parted sides of Fen’Harel’s skin.

“Press it in,” he bade her. “All the way to the deepest part of the wound. Begin your sutures there and move upward.” A reminder: “Envision a thousand, a hundred thousand stitches.”

Ellana put the notion of a needle from her mind, rather picturing countless bare threads piercing the muscle and drawing it closed. As she watched, the awful fissure began to seal.

A rush of success brought greater magic, along with a caution from Fen’Harel: “Not so fast. A body will go into shock if it is healed too quickly, just as it will when it is harmed.”

Ellana was quick to restrain the magic, guiding it to make steady progress on the wound. Fen’Harel stayed quiet as she worked, a light sweat breaking out on her forehead from the effort. When the skin became whole again—rosy as hers—she released the spell, but not his hand.

Neither did he pull it away. “Well done, Ellana. You have a talent for healing magic.”

“Truly? It would be a great gift for the clan.”

His nostrils flared like he’d caught the odor of something distasteful, but the moue faded away as he looked to where Ellana still cradled his hand in hers. “Healing is a close cousin to another school of magic.”

With a spell Ellana didn’t recognize, he cleaned the blood from their skin and shifted so that their palms met. Warmth crawled up through her veins to infuse the rest of her arm. It eased across her shoulder and over her breasts, tightening their peaks. She took a shocked sip of air as she recognized the tantalizing play of pleasure magic.

Fen’Harel’s white teeth showed. “If you have a talent for healing, you will have one for this as well.” Another pulse emanated from where he touched her, heady enough to make her squirm.

“Will you teach me that, too?”

“If you wish. It is, unlike healing, something you can practice on yourself.”

Ellana couldn’t help but think of standing by the statue in the meadow, when she’d longed to nestle against it and touch herself to thoughts of the Dread Wolf. I could bring you to your peak without a touch, he’d said. Had she the spells he’d used, she might’ve silently and surreptitiously relieved the ache of arousal without shedding a single piece of clothing. That would be a great gift in a shared aravel, where she would not risk the tell-tale sounds of a hand between her thighs, no matter how tied up in knots she was.

“You are blushing,” Fen’Harel said, studying her with interest. “Does that prospect entice you?”

She couldn’t lie when he fixed her with his lovely blue-gray gaze. “Yes.”

“Then it shall be our second lesson tonight.” He brought their joined palms between them at the level of his chest, lifting the other expectantly up. Ellana laid hers—smaller and narrower—against it. “This spellwork is one of Sylaise’s more ingenious inventions,” he said.

“The goddess of the hearth?” asked Ellana. Of healing, home, and craft, too; her boons to the elvhen people were the clothes they wove and the meals they prepared—the herbs for poultices as well as cookery.

“Is that what she is called here?” said Fen’Harel. “The hearthfire suits. She wields it fiercely. Her flames brought countless of our enemies to their knees.”

“She was a warrior?” Ellana said, disconsonance clanging like broken bells in her mind. The Hearthkeeper, and those who took her vallaslin, provided for the clan while others protected it.

Fen’Harel replied, doleful, “We all were. But that is not the matter at hand.” He pressed his palms firmly to Ellana’s, the beginnings of a spell lighting there and chasing off thoughts of any god but him.

“To give pleasure, you must know it,” he told her. “You have taken it at your own hands before. Draw on those memories, what you felt as you passed your fingertips over your skin, the sweet agony before release.”

Ellana knew well she had flushed again, but nodded her understanding.

“As you did the veilfire,” he continued, “gather the magic around you. Bind it to those memories, infuse them with it.”

Ellana, closing her eyes, imagined running her fingers down her belly to the crest of her pubic bone, as she did when she was alone. In this vision, however, the forefingers lit with green-tinted magic, and the muscles of her stomach contracted.

“Good,” said Fen’Harel.

Ellana blinked her eyes open to see the pale glow of a spell haloing her right hand, where it rested against his. “You can feel it?”

He nodded.

“Is it…”

“Pleasurable? See for yourself.” Taking her by the wrist, he guided her hand to her cheek. Prickles spread from the point of contact; nowhere near as potent as his magic, but a promise of it. He said, “Use the memories. Draw more power from the Fade, if you must.”

She might’ve let her eyelids droop again and conjure the stolen moments of solitude against rough tree trunks—her own callused caresses—but it was Fen’Harel she looked to: the shape of his lips and the recollection of how plush and skillful they had been at her ear. A light graze of teeth. His tongue at the lobe, sucking lightly. Around them, she bound magic, the Veil shifting to afford her more. She slid her fingers from her cheek to the right ear, and a thrill arched through it, along her neck, and down to pool hot in her gut.

“You are sensitive there,” said Fen’Harel, his attention having followed her movement—and her body’s response.

“I didn’t know,” said Ellana, hushed and honest. “Not until last night.”

Fen’Harel’s grip at her wrist tightened. “You were remembering that to feed the spell? What I did to you?”

She heard a fretful note, but was too wrapped up in the spellwork to offer anything more than a hum of assent. Fen’Harel tongued the ring in his lip, and another burst of sensation flew from her fingers, making her shiver.

“Ellana,” he said, pointed in his accent, “have you taken pleasure while you thought of me?”

“No,” she replied, watching the flexion of his jaw as he clenched it tight. “But I wanted to.”

It was not her magic that seared across her skin then, but the wolf’s predacious intent. He said, “Show me.”

Ellana’s courage—newfound in the success of her spell—faltered. He couldn’t mean for her to— While he looked on? No.

And yet, at the tip of her ear, where her fingers were still poised, magic sparked, betraying eagerness rather than fear. She said, “What about the spells? The lesson.”

“You have what you need to know,” he replied. “Now you must practice.” His chest filled with a breath, the wrought silver buttons of his vest flashing, and when he spoke again, it was lower: “Let it be your offering.”

Over his shoulder, Ellana could see the altar, decayed oblations scattered before its snarling idol. If Fen’Harel had never been drawn to the shrine before he’d come to her, none who had offered them would have known him as she now did: a god of flesh and blood who would not be satisfied with incense or prayers. He wanted her, and she could not—did not wish to—deny him.

She stayed silent long enough that he followed her gaze to the altar. The veilfire-filled braziers backlit the straight line of his nose, the jut of his chin, and the upward curve of his mouth. “An appropriate place to lay an offering,” he said.

Curling his fingers down between hers, he started to rise. Ellana was drawn with him, one foot and then the other, ten steps to the altar’s edge. Fen’Harel swept the leavings of past worshipers from it with one arm, uncaring of the ashy stains it left on his sleeve.

“Sit,” he said, “or lie. However you prefer.”

“Should I take off my clothes?” Ellana asked.

Fen’Harel faced his likeness, a thoughtful furrow in his stern brow. “Do it as you would have, had you the opportunity you wanted.”

Ellana considered the great wolf statue. It dwarfed the humble one her clan had placed in the meadow, but she would fit between its paws in the same manner: nestled against it with her trousers around her ankles and shirt rucked up, frantically rubbing between her legs in a rush not to be caught. Hardly a desirable tableau. Or maybe it was—like knowing a secret, partaking in it. A bolt of unexpected appetite went down Ellana’s back to think of Fen’Harel catching her out so.

She let that guide her to the laces of her trousers, and, as she unlaced them, backed toward the altar, until it met her legs. Fen’Harel stood by, regard unwavering, when she pushed them over her hips and down. The hem of her shirt hung just above her mound, the linen a thin barrier between her bare backside and the cool stone as she sat upon the altar. It rasped lightly with each inch she slid backwards, finally landing with her shoulder blades against the wolf’s forelegs. She parted her knees enough to afford herself room to work—and so that Fen’Harel might better see. He approved, if the click of his teeth against the ring in his lip was any indication. Ellana lifted her shirt to bare one breast and cupped it the hand she’d cut to bring him to her.

A sigh passed her lips when she rolled the nipple by habit—the way she always started when she was alone. But this time, she gathered the magic around her, coiled it about the memory of Fen’Harel’s thumb and forefinger in place of hers, and the intensity of the sensation doubled. Her blissful moan bounced off mosaic walls.

The right hand she brought to her middle, stroking featherlight. The magic raised the delicate hairs there. Heat flared at her center; it wouldn’t take long before she was ready for her fingers.

Or Fen’Harel’s. Though she wasn’t going to get them, she expected, as he stood at five paces with his arms tucked behind him: an oddly formal pose. He watched her, barely blinking, as she settled her hand against herself, middle finger resting over her slit. The scant graze of that place fueled her sense of the magic around her, and she pulled it to her hands, until they shimmered. The wash of static arousal set her legs to trembling. She pinched the puckered peak of her breast with bespelled fingers, and it drew a ragged sound from her, fractured with lust.

Trousers a confining vise about her lower legs, she kicked one free, then the second. The leather landed on the flagstones, and Ellana parked her heels at the edge of the altar, as open as she’d been last night—though the stone wolf did not embrace her as the dread one had.

She panted as she teased the edge of her slit, the tips of her forefingers just breaching. Hers was not the only quick, deep breath in the shrine. Fen’Harel’s chest was rising and falling visibly, his lips parted. The pink of a flush graced his prominent cheekbones. Ellana’s magic surged again as she saw the shape of him straining hard against the laces of his trousers. To arouse a god simply by touching herself…

She pressed in at last, withdrew, and pushed back into herself to set a rhythm, if not a hasty one. She was not in the hurry she would’ve been that afternoon, and if Fen’Harel once again demanded her pleasure as an offering without attending to his own, wicked determination spurred her to make a make a show for his benefit.

Releasing her breast, she brought the fingers of her left hand to her mouth, wetting them on her tongue before she laid them at the top of her sex. Magic nearly sent her careening over the edge with barely a whisper of a brush, but she reined it back, caressing that place as she stroked herself within. She made a wanton display, she was certain: thighs spread wide, shirt bunched to expose one breast, nipple reddened from her worrying it, back arched. But any self-consciousness was forgotten as she chased ecstasy. Her eyes fluttered closed.

“Stop.”

The order landed like a blow, and Ellana’s movements stuttered to a halt, agonizing as it was to be interrupted when she had been so close.

Footsteps approached, quick and light. She opened her eyes to see Fen’Harel standing above her, his gaze shining that ethereal violet. She might’ve asked what he wanted of her next, but words withered as he sank in a fluid motion to kneel: a supplicant at his own altar, his gold-crested head bracketed by her naked legs.

When he took Ellana by the wrists and drew her hands away, she let him, despite how her body howled with a yen for more. That was lost, however, as he put a spell-lit hand at her center and said, voice strained, “Ar nadas.” I must. His magic flowed over Ellana, stronger than her own, and she shouted with shock and relief as he slid two fingers into her.

He took her in the same sure strokes he had the night before, his right hand planted firmly on her thigh. She watched him as he watched the place they were joined, beautiful and severe in his concentration. She yearned to stroke the elaborate braiding of his hair, or perhaps catch the golden cuff at the top of his ear between her fingers. Were his as sensitive as hers? To keep herself from it, she reached up to grasp the wolf’s snout, her short nails scraping against the stone.

He pressed deep and stopped, leaving her confounded only for a moment before he curled his fingers up to a place inside her only she knew. He stroked her there, his thumb landing at the top of her sex. Magic pulsed and Ellana went taut, at the very cusp of climax.

“Garas, Ellana,” Fen’Harel said. “For me, now.”

Exquisite pressure mixed with the spell put her over the edge at his command. Body wracked, her cries filled the night. They might have been nothing, or perhaps his name; she could not be certain in the barrage of white-hot waves.

He didn’t immediately release the magic, letting it die slowly, eliciting trembling jerks of her muscles with each dwindling throb. When he did end it, Ellana was barely hanging on to the statue, boneless and gasping.

She stifled a hiss of protest as he withdrew his fingers. They glistened in the veilfire light. She turned to seek any cloth, so that he might wipe them clean, only to freeze solid, as if bound by a mage’s ice, when he brought them to his mouth. Setting them on his tongue, he sucked up to the first knuckle and then the second. He closed his eyes—too long for a blink—while Ellana stared, astounded. She’d heard enough brash young hunters praising a woman’s taste to know it was done, but to see Fen’Harel lapping her essence from his fingertips like honey struck her speechless.

When he took his hand away, Ellana tracked its progress to land on her inner thigh, where gooseflesh rippled. “You did well,” he said. “Before I interrupted you.”

Dazed by his touch, damp from both of them, Ellana said clumsily, “Interrupted me?”

“Your practice of the spell,” came the reply. “For the sake of your lesson, I should not have intervened.”

Considering him staying back, his hands held primly behind him, she couldn’t stop a disgruntled wrinkle of her long nose. “I can practice by myself. Later. I can’t do that.” She looked to his fingers and then his mouth, hoping he understood the precise meaning.

From the way he pursed his lips, eyebrows lifting, she suspected he did. “You fodder my pride. It is…captivating.”

Ellana asked, “Is that wrong?”

“No. You did what I asked of you”—a tender brush of the side of her knee—“beautifully.”

Ellana couldn’t deny she felt such, spread as she was upon his altar. It made her bold. She brushed the back of his hand, up to the knob of his wrist.

The tightness in his brow released, his lips curling up. “Perhaps my transgression can be of use to you. The memory can serve for your practice.”

Of that Ellana had no doubt. “The healing will be more difficult to train,” she said, “if there aren’t enough cuts and scrapes among my clan. I can try it on myself—”

Fen’Harel turned his hand under hers and, lacing their fingers together, squeezed. “Do not harm yourself, even for that.”

The concern—and his soft skin against hers—plucked a contented string in her chest, and the magic around her reacted, pulsing through their joined hands. It did not crackle with the same avidity as before, but Fen’Harel jerked in response. Her own pride burned, for she was sure she could please him, if he would allow it. With greater intention, she stroked her thumb along his.

“No,” he said again. “You have offered all I require.”

Halfhearted as the declaration sounded, Ellana would do nothing he didn’t want—and not only because it was the mandate of a god; forcing the matter was distasteful. She withdrew the magic and her hand. Tugging her shirt down to cover her breast and belly, she asked, “Will you return home to rest now?”

“As much as is possible,” he replied, sitting back on his heels. “I still have many questions, but I fear the answers do not lie in the library. Felassan will be satisfied to have been right.”

“‘Slow arrow?’” Ellana said.

“So he named himself,” said Fen’Harel. “He is a friend, and reads battlefields as cleverly as he reads me. It was Felassan’s suspicion that in order to learn more of this place, I must study it here, not in Vir Dirthara.” Inhaling, he reached for Ellana’s trousers and set them upon the altar for her to take. “It will be inconvenient to tell him I returned but have learned nothing more.”

Ellana chewed her cheek, weighing how to proceed. She settled on: “I distracted you from your…studies.”

Fen’Harel shook his head. “I agreed to teach you. You could not have known I had any other intentions. And”—a one-sided smile—“it was a fruitful exercise.”

Stomach fluttering at the suggestive timbre, Ellana returned the smile. “You can stay. I’ll tell you what I know of the Marches.”

“And of the Veil,” said Fen’Harel. “But not now. I am tired, and you should return to your clan before it gets too deep into the night. Is it safe, the way you must go?”

“Yes. And I can fight, if I have to.” Tapping the leather of her trousers, she ventured, “When would you like me to come again?”

His teeth were a bright flash of mischief. “As often as you like, now that you know the spells.”

Despite the crudeness of that, Ellana laughed.

Fen’Harel said, “That is a fine sound. I should like to hear it again. Tomorrow. Your tomorrow.”

“Weeks for you?” Ellana said.

“Apparently. But it is barely any time at all, when you have lived as long as I have.” Pushing himself up, he got to his feet. At the altar’s edge, he reached out to put a lock of hair back from her face. “Although, I am not accustomed to having much to wait for.”

Ellana tilted her head slightly, inviting him to brush the tip of her ear. He did, and she trembled. A distinct hunger passed through his expression, igniting hope in her that he might stay after all, but he drew his hand back.

“Dress,” he said, “before you grow chilled.”

As he turned his back on her, as if to preserve her modesty, she slipped down from the altar to tug her trousers on and shove her shirt into the waistband.

Coming to stand at his side, she caught their reflections in the eluvian: a broad-shouldered scholar-god and a willowy, plain-clothed young Dalish woman. They made an incongruous pair, yet she saw in the glossless waves of her hair and the blush of her complexion the artless beauty he’d claimed she possessed at their first meeting. Hardly a match for his dignified splendor, but a comely counterpoint—one that stirred him to desire, and in that she could take pride. Solas.

Fen'Harel's hand grazed hers as he stooped to retrieve the book he’d brought from where it lay on the flagstones. He’d thrown it off the altar with the rest to make space for her. “I will return this to the library. All that I need to know, I will find here.” Facing her again, he said, “I await your summons.”

“I’ll come again as soon as I can,” she said.

The eluvian, brought to life with a gesture, illuminated the stark, noble lines of his profile. Ellana longed to caress his jaw—to bid him stay—but could not presume to demand anything of him. Instead, she said, “Dareth shiral. Until we meet again.”

“Nadas, Ellana,” he said—inevitably—and left her.

Chapter Text

Through the eluvian, Solas was delivered from the lambent jade glow of veilfire to a bar of brilliant midmorning sun, shocking him momentarily blind. He raised the leatherbound book to shade his eyes and took two ungraceful steps ahead, until his toes met the edge of a plush rug. The texture and hue he recognized: thick ram’s wool dyed in vibrant jewel tones—the ones he favored when he painted. A gift from Mythal, it lay across the polished marble floor of his bedchamber in Arlathan.

Once again, he had passed from no particular portal—in this case, the eluvian in Vir Dirthara—to the sunken shrine and from it to an entirely unconnected mirror. Such a thing should not have been possible, with each eluvian bound to one other. Blood magic strong enough to alter their nature posed more than a quandary; it compromised the entire labyrinth. There would be no avoiding a conversation with June now, to safeguard the empire.

But that would require revelation of Ellana Lavellan and her Veil-bound land, and that, to Solas’s bemusement, sat as uneasily with him as did the prospective threat to Elvhenan.

Lowering the book from his face, he turned his palm up to study the pale pink line across it, freshly healed. It had been impetuous to cut so deep, and it had hurt fiercely, regardless of the mask of indifference he had worn. Mouth twisting with sour disdain, he saw it for what it was: a pantomime of his godly mettle; but when Ellana had been duly awed, pride had come as a victorious purr in his chest.

That had diminished some as she had set to work on the wound, her novice effort clever but indelicate. The pain had made him lightheaded when she had, in her enthusiasm, poured too much magic into the healing. Thankfully, she had taken his correction well and restricted the flow. The whiteness at the edges of his vision had cleared, and he had watched the lines of her vallaslin wrinkle in concentration as she continued.

Ably so. She had claimed her healing talents limited, but had needed no more guidance. You have a talent for healing, he had told her after, as she cradled his hand in hers, both heated from the spell.

Truly? It would be a great gift for the clan.

A selfless declaration at his compliment. By all accounts, he should have admired it, but instead annoyance had pinched behind his eyebrows. He had wished her to relish her success, to deservedly preen. Yet, her heart had gone immediately to her people and her usefulness to them. Perhaps Solas should not have been surprised, considering her ambition to be First, but it had aggravated him. He had decided to teach a spell that would benefit her alone.

It was among Sylaise’s earliest and finest achievements, and she had shared it freely over many centuries and many lovers. Not that Solas had been among them since the earliest days, when the People had been so few and so untried that shared curiosity did not involve any particular affection. The delicate games and entanglements of going to another’s bed—or taking them to his—had come later, and Solas’s interest in such complications had waned with time.

Albeit, what was Ellana Lavellan, if not a snarl of complication? She and her enigmatic Free Marches had driven him to distraction for three weeks.

He had attempted, after the first frantic release upon his return from the shrine, to let thoughts of her pressed against him, writhing and crying out, fall by the wayside. He gave his attention to the books in the library, leaving no stone—or page—unturned as he sought any record of the Veil; but when he put study aside and lay down to sleep, she was there waiting for him: dream-distorted, as all night’s visions were, but no less beautiful.

She would strip bare for him and nestle into the the space he made between his legs, her woodsy scent all around him. He would press his fingers deep into her ready heat as he traced the long edge of her ear with his tongue. “Fen’Harel,” she would murmur, and he would not correct her. When she came for him, he would glory in her wracking pleasure.

Which he himself never reached. Instead, he woke hard and shaking with dissatisfaction, forced to use the echo of reverie and only a few hasty, dry strokes to spill across his belly. He then rose, washed the leavings from his skin, and dressed for another day among the scrolls, tomes, and wells of memory.

But there had been nothing, and each time he had passed through an eluvian, its cool wash of magic had carried him to his intended destination, not the shrine. He had spoken true when he had told Ellana that by that third week his hope had dwindled that he would return. What he had omitted was the excruciating vexation of that.

Today, he had spent more gainless hours in Vir Dirthara, at the precipice of admitting defeat. The book he had taken with him was the last—to be read following yet another sure-to-be restive night’s sleep. He had stepped into the eluvian with home and surrender in mind, only to end up in the very place he had sought.

And there she had been, greeting him formally, the dark waves of her hair unbound about her shoulders. She had worn an expression of alarm, and Solas had quashed the magic he had called to defend himself. He had had no time to make an apology; his gaze had gone directly to the blood dripping from her fist.

What have you done?

What I had to. For you.

His temper had flared at her recklessness, but more so at the damage she had done on his behalf. The mess of red on her pale hand was his doing, however indirectly.

He had nearly cursed aloud when he had pressed his thumb too near the wound, making her wince. His upset was no reason to cause her further pain. Gently, he had drawn her to the tattered remains of the cloak he had abandoned at his first leavetaking.

He had been so entirely focused on Ellana that he had not given much thought to the thing, but contemplating its wear now, it added yet another variable to the strange discontinuity between Arlathan and the shrine—his world and Ellana’s.

Frustration throbbed at his brow, the start of a headache. He had been exhausted upon leaving the library, and the loss of blood from Ellana’s lesson strained his stamina. 

But what she had given him in exchange…

Lying upon Fen’Harel’s altar in the most profane of offerings, pleasuring herself using the spell he had taught—and thinking of him as she did: his fingers at her breasts, his lips against her ear, his breath over the skin of her neck. At least, those were the things he had conjured in his nights alone, and the wave of arousal when he had imagined her reliving them had been staggering.

He had not intended to touch her. The spell was a gift from the deity he had let himself playact again, and that was disgraceful enough; he had no right to crave more. But watching her come apart under her own hands had broken the tenuous rein he had on his lust.

Ar nadas, he had said as he had knelt between her spread thighs, turning the spell and his desire on her.

When she broke, she had shouted for Fen’Harel, and in that shining moment, he had felt like a god.

After, she had watched him with blue-gray eyes wide as he had put his fingers, glistening with her slickness, into his mouth. If it had disgusted her, he had not bothered to care; she had tasted as fine as he had imagined, and he had taken his time about enjoying it.

He suspected no offense had been given, since she had brushed her spell across his wrist, turning the magic about and sorely testing his restraint. It would have been nigh-effortless to grasp her ankles and draw her to the front of the altar; to rise to his feet and unlace his trousers; to gather her to him and press inside; to claim her as no man yet had. The prospect had roused the wolf in him, howling and slavering to hunt and to take.

It was that that had stopped him. He had not trusted himself not to savage her: another misuse for his own benefit. A first time could be vigorous, but his instincts in the shrine, with Ellana so delectably displayed for him, had demanded something far more ferocious than vigor. He could not succumb to that, and so had told her she had already given him what he required.

Solas ground his teeth, audible in the silent room, for that was but a fraction of what he wanted, and given another meeting—another of Ellana’s willing offerings—those desires could too easily become the Dread Wolf’s requirements.

Tossing the book onto his bed, he stalked toward the door and the sitting room beyond, where he could find a cup of something to take the jagged edges off his mood.

He kept wine, and the sipping liquors Felassan favored, in a cabinet by the windows, out of the sun that might spoil them. The day beyond the glass looked fair, not quite crisp with encroaching autumn. It had been far chillier in the Free Marches.

Solas clicked the cabinet open to retrieve an unopened bottle. Rather than cut the wax seal, he melted it with a spell, narrowly avoiding the hot runnels of green down its sides. As he waited for them to cool, he heard a droll voice behind him: “A little early, isn’t it?”

Felassan leaned against the low arm of a divan, his long legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles. A plate rested on his thighs, an unbroken spiral of apple peel left to brown on it. He was shaving thin pieces of the fruit off with his dagger, bringing the sharp blade dangerously close to his lips with each bite.

“Yes,” Solas said curtly, “if you have been to sleep. Which I have not.”

“That much is clear,” said Felassan around another sliver of apple, “from your sunny disposition.”

Solas, attending to the bottle again, spilled fragrant wine into a cup. He used it to aim a frowning toast at Felassan. When he drank, elderflower washed Ellana’s musk away.

Unperturbed by his grousing, Felassan asked, “Did you go crawling through the dustiest archives all night?” A gesture at Solas’s knees, where his trousers were besmirched from the shrine’s dirty floor.

“Nothing so simple,” he replied.

Felassan paused mid-chew, sitting up by inches. “You were there.” At Solas’s minute nod, he said, “I had not thought you would be again.”

“Nor I,” said Solas, leaning his backside against the lip of the cabinet. “And before you set to interrogate me, no, I still do not know how or why.”

“No wonder you’re dour.” Felassan set the remainder of his breakfast aside and got to his feet. “You hate to be foiled, especially if it means you don’t look clever.”

Solas shot him a venomous glare, but Felassan only laughed, his point proven. Sauntering toward him, Felassan plucked the cup from his hand and took a drink. He screwed up his nose, saying, “Sweet. I don’t know how you can stomach it,” as he shoved the cup back into Solas’s grip. “Especially at this hour. You’d do better with a bath and some rest.”

Both sounded marvelous, in fact, but Solas had yet to ease the coil of unsatisfied want in his lower belly. He would not be able to settle until he’d dealt with it. Perhaps in the bath, where he could pretend the heated water was the clutch of Ellana’s body. How well she would have banished the chill as he held her against him, the her silken inner thighs meeting his hips as he drove into her.

Felassan’s voice, lightly chiding, drew him from the fantasy: “You could have that bath drawn while you finished your drink, if we had someone to do so.”

Solas’s arousal evaporated in a flash of fury. “I will not bind any of the People in servitude,” he said.

“I do not mean slaves,” said Felassan, “as you well know. But we can employ servants.”

“No.”

“Living here to work for us would keep them out of bondage,” Felassan pressed, “to one of the others.”

Solas landed his cup hard on the cabinet’s top, sloshing the wine over his hand. “I have given you my answer,” he snarled, “now and many times before. I am no one’s master.”

Felassan lifted a dark eyebrow. “I was not made to be your adjutant. Before you took my counsel, I cleaned your armor and brought your meals. Do you think your bed sheets were changed by magic?”

Solas’s stomach clenched, empty save for the wine. “I released you from those obligations long ago. You are not a servant in this house.”

“No,” said Felassan, “I chose to be here, and others would as well—willingly, gladly. They know they will not be slaves to you, ever.”

Maybe that was so—Solas had indeed come the trust and rely upon his friend’s counsel during the war, and his understanding of people was admittedly keener than Solas’s own—but bringing the world-born into his home to prepare his baths or scrub the floors when they might otherwise be free to discover pursuits of learning and labor they loved… That he could not bear.

When Solas gave no response, Felassan sighed through his nose. “Forgive me. I did not mean to start an argument first thing. I’ll go. I’ll—”

The lifting of a heavy latch interrupted him, he and Solas turning to see the door to their home swing wide as a stately figure came through it, skirts and inky hair snapping as had their regiment’s banners.

Solas came away from the cabinet, squaring his shoulders, as Felassan fell into rank beside him, ducking his head.

“Mythal.”

Eyes of malachite set in an oval face, its soft contours clement and handsome, landed on Solas as he spoke her name. Her stout brow was absent the headpiece she had worn throughout the war, her gown lissome velvet rather than hide and mail. The top of her head came only to Solas’s breastbone, but the magic in the room coalesced around her, innervated and vital—threatening, if she willed it.

The flintiness of her gaze gave as it slid from Solas to Felassan. Her full lips, red without paints, curved into a benevolent bow. She crossed to him and laid her petite right hand upon his cheek. 

“My sharpest arrow,” she said sweetly, “how well you look.” Her thumb brushed the branch tattooed across his cheekbone, a mark of his allegiance. “Hale and comely as ever. I must come here more, so that I might appreciate you.”

Felassan returned her smile, though he stood stock still, making no move to touch her in return. Ever the decorous solider to his general. “You are most welcome,” he said. “Always.”

Mythal hummed without acknowledging that. She said, “Such a fine voice. How I miss the nights you would sing for us. We were worn from the day’s travails, but found such comfort in your music.”

Her praise brought a boyish flush to Felassan’s face. Envy throbbed under the well of Solas’s eye, like her short fingers had grazed it.

“You must come to the banquet tomorrow,” she said to Felassan, her chin tipped up to look at him, and him alone. Felassan, pinned by her attention, did not mark the path of her left arm. Solas nearly missed it, too, until he felt her caress his bare elbow. Hidden but determined, the touch soothed his resentment. She had not forgotten him; she would never forget him.

To Felassan she said, “Arrange for an early lunch. On the terrace. I must speak with Solas, but then we will dine together and you shall tell me of all you have been doing.” The last, lingering brush of his cheek was a silent dismissal.

He went in hurried steps out of the sitting room, closing the door behind him.

Mythal’s plying touch at Solas’s elbow relented. She raised her hand, the nails long and pointed, to his face, trailing down to his chin. There, she grasped him firmly. “I sought you last night, through the eluvian, but all was dark.”

Solas cut a glance at the door to his bedchamber. His private eluvian was well hidden in the labyrinth, and warded so that none but he could come through it. Or so he had thought.

“Where were you?” Mythal asked, sweetness for Felassan turned to stone for Solas.

The truth was a floral note on his tongue, finer than the wine, but it stuck behind his teeth—something to savor rather than speak. “The forest,” he replied. Not wholly untrue, as long as she did not seek to know which forest. “I was at Vir Dirthara, but did not return immediately.”

Mythal’s thumb and forefinger were cool and tight about his chin. “You have always valued your solitary walks, moon- or sunlit.” Solas said nothing, awaiting temper or temperance, one just as likely as the other. With a curt, “Very well,” Mythal released her hold on him and swept over to the cabinet to help herself to the bottle and Solas’s cup.

“My favorite,” she said, when she had tasted the elderflower wine. “Well, it used to be. Elgar’nan has a taste for reds, and I am coming to share it.” Another sip. “You left his last gathering poorly. I had to give apologies, when you did not come to make them yourself.”

One word, so simply spoken, pealed like a bell. “Come?” said Solas. “To Elgar’nan and…” He trailed off in feeble hopes that he might be mistaken. 

“He keeps rooms for me,” Mythal said, peering through the windows at a cloudless, pale purple sky. “I have been staying there to observe him—and his growing ambition.”

Dread formed a knot in Solas’s throat. “He is among the great founders and stewards of Elvhenan. He is venerated—worshiped. What more does he want?”

“He is among the stewards,” said Mythal, “and some of them are not as amenable to his rise as we, his friends, are.”

Solas managed not snap that Elgar’nan was no friend to him—that he never had been. Maintaining what equanimity he could, he said, “You mean Anaris and his allies.”

Mythal nodded. “Our brothers and sisters, as aged as we, who fought at our sides, would now sow chaos in the peace we have built here.”

“By seeking to check Elgar’nan’s power?” said Solas. “That is not chaos; it is caution.”

Rounding on him, Mythal said, “Or cowardice. If we had been as timid as they in wartime, we could not have sundered our enemies.”

Solas flinched, the sounds of fury, agony, and madness conjured from his memory in a terrible chorus. “Had they found another way,” he said, “I would have heeded them. Sparing the great dreamers—”

Mythal set the wine cup down, the sharpness of a moment before turning to consolation as she held his cheek. “They do not have of your wisdom, my love, and if you could see no other avenue to victory, there was none. I trusted you in that, and I ask you to trust me in this.”

Solas leaned into her palm. “You united us in war. Could you do it again? Convince Anaris to accept Elgar’nan’s rule?”

“I must try,” said Mythal, “and I need your counsel as much now as I did then.”

Solas took in the tender, mollifying curve of her mouth, so like the one she had worn when he had first opened his eyes to a bright, too-loud world. She had offered him comfort and assurance as they lay on a fallen titan’s back, embracing his fresh-forged body as he wept.

He asked, “What would you have me do?”

“Learn what you can of Anaris and his allies,” Mythal replied. “Everyone in their circles, down to the woman who washes their bedclothes.”

“And then?”

“I will put it to use in my negotiations.”

“And if those fail?” Solas said. “Elgar’nan yet has a taste for war. It would not take much to set him on that path again, if he does not get his way. Will you ensure he does not?”

“You know I cannot promise such things, Solas,” Mythal said. “But I will attempt it, for you.” Rising up onto her toes, she brushed her parted lips lightly over his, the tip of her tongue at the gold ring.

Solas should have opened at the tacit request, as he always had, but in the kiss he tasted the cruel smile she had sported at Elgar’nan’s banquet, when callous laughter and mockery had filled the hall. Which was truer, that or her caring one, he could no longer be sure, and so kept his lips closed.

Mythal withdrew slowly, a shallow groove between her winged eyebrows. It went, though, as she dragged her nails lightly along Solas’s jaw. “Do not take too long in your reports,” she said, and turned to leave.

“What of lunch?” Solas asked. “Felassan will have started.”

“I am certain you can make my excuses,” Mythal tossed over her shoulder, “as I had to make yours.”

Solas, taking her barbed point, gave no protest as she went out.

The terrace lay at the foot of a staircase in sun shadow of the east-facing house, overlooking a tiered garden. Spells and the goodwill of resident spirits kept aromatic embrium, spicy rashvine, and a small pool of blood lotus thriving, since neither Solas nor Felassan had particular talents for it; but they both enjoyed the colors and smells of so many living things. The astounding variety of flora in the world was, by Solas’s reckoning, among its finest merits, and he could not have enjoyed it so without hands to put into the dirt or a nose to breathe in a flower’s scent. A table stood at the center of the terrace, where Felassan was laying out a modest repast for three.

“The larder is nearly empty,” he said to Solas said as he sliced into a wheel of smoked cheese. “We only have yesterday’s bread, some fruit…”

“It will be enough,” Solas said, “for the two of us.”

Felassan, a bowl of plump blackberries poised to set down, stopped and looked to him. “She is not joining us.”

Solas shook his head. “She sends her regrets.”

Felassasn’s industrious concentration turned to cool sobriety. “Should I bother to ask what she said to you?”

Solas was tempted to confide the task Mythal had given—two could gather more information, and faster—yet he would not draw his friend into such plays of power. Felassan had been made flesh in the midst of war, had known nothing but service to his general and her second until it had ended. Peace had made his smiles wider, his humor less grim, and Solas wished to protect that.

“I have the matter in hand.” He plucked one of the berries up, so ripe its flesh gave and bled vibrant juice onto the pads of his fingers.

Felassan pushed the bowl to him. “Then you have time to eat and sleep.”

As urgent as Mythal’s commands could be, he did not have the acuity, worn out as he was, to face Anaris and the others; they were as clever of tacticians as any of the oldest spirit-born and would recognize clumsy attempts at subterfuge. Solas would need to have all his wits about him, and at the moment, he did not.

Putting the berry into his mouth, he sank into the chair at the head of the table. Felassan took the place at his right. When he reached for Solas’s plate to fill it, Solas caught his wrist.

“You do not serve me, my friend.”

Felassan, annoyance wrinkling his nose, tugged his arm free. He did not directly reach to fill his own plate.

Solas, regretful of the snappishness, said, “You are not wrong that we could benefit from servants, and I know you would see them housed, clothed, and compensated well. But”—the mention of Anaris’s washerwoman came to the forefront of his mind—“the more eyes and ears about, the more vulnerable we become.”

“You believe servants would be spies?” Felassan asked. “For whom?” A chilly tightness came into his face where it had pinked under Mythal’s touch. “She wouldn’t.”

“No,” said Solas. “Never. But others might.”

Felassan’s chin dropped. “I did not think it could come to that: mistrusting each other.”

“We were not all once of spirits of loyalty,” Solas said, offering a muted smile.

Felassan did not return it. “We will not take on servants, then. But it does mean more cold, simple lunches.”

Solas retrieved a knife and cut a piece of cheese. He lay it on a slice of bread, which was indeed on its way to being stale. “I am content with that.”

Felassan helped himself to the food as well, a measure of levity returning to his voice as he asked, “Will you be absent again as you attend to this ‘matter’ of yours? As you have been these past weeks in the library?”

Solas swallowed his bread and cheese too soon, the sizeable chunks almost painful as they slid down his throat. In Mythal’s visit and orders, the eluvians, blood magic, and Ellana Lavellan had dropped from his thoughts entirely. Their return came with a lance of displeasure—that squabbling in Arlathan had taken his attention from a thing that actually interested him, and would only pull him further from it in the coming days.

Perhaps that was a boon, sparing him a knot of unanswered questions and persistent, unruly desire. It could fill three weeks of waiting for another summons, and he had a duty to the empire he had helped to build.

He replied, “Likely, but I will make sure to eat and sleep.”

Felassan huffed. “That I'll believe when I see it.”

Solas raised another bit of bread in salute, Felassan did the same, and while they might have enjoyed their general’s company, they did not want for it.

Chapter Text

Syrupy and blue-black, a poultice of prophet’s laurel left bruise-like stains on Ellana’s fingers that, if left to dry, could last for days. As a child, she had taken a sachet of leaves from the Keeper’s store, mashed them between flat stones, and used the resultant mess to draw crude approximations of vallaslin across her face, a muddy pond her mirror.

When Deshanna had seen her handiwork, Ellana had been scolded first for stealing and second for insult to the Creators. The wobbly lines and inexpert swirls bore no resemblance to any particular god’s markings and could be seen, the Keeper had admonished, as mockery. 

Wiping a nose snotty from crying, Ellana had asked, “Will the All-Father punish me?”

Deshanna had produced a cloth, taken Ellana’s sticky hand away, and dabbed at the wetness. “Elgar’nan’s justice can be fierce.” At the little girl’s sniffle of fright, she’d added, “But the All-Mother guards the children who know not what they do.” A brush of her thumb against Ellana’s marked cheekbone. “You wished to be as the hunters are: reverent of the Creators in bearing their symbols. Even the god of retribution can see that. But you must vow not to do so again.”

Ellana had, with as much vehemence as a child of seven could muster, and then stayed out of sight until the false vallaslin faded, flitting between the Keeper’s aravel and the one she slept in, taking her meals alone rather than from the shared table. Hathaan, then six, had babbled forlornly to his mother and father that “Lana” had gone missing. Had the Dread Wolf taken her?

That had earned him a hissed warning not to invoke the Betrayer, which had started him sobbing. When they had met the next morning for their lessons, Ellana had hugged him about the shoulders and said she was sorry for making him sad. He had looked at her with quizzical blue eyes, his reprimand from the day before seemingly forgotten, and complained that she smelled of wet wool. Having fallen asleep in the meadow after avoiding another supper, Ellana had woken surrounded by the warm bodies of the halla.

In the following years, she had watched the older children approach the threshold of adulthood, their excitement counterbalanced by dread for the ordeal itself, when the Keeper, her blade tipped with magic, inscribed the vallaslin upon their upturned faces. All the clan gathered for the ceremonies: hunters solemn and expectant, youths keen to see their friends earn honored places among the adults, and parents blanched at the reminder of the pain they’d had to withstand in silence—now the trial of their sons and daughters.

Only one boy had ever failed to bear the agony, tears mixed with ink running down his cheeks to land damning splotches across a skinny chest. He had chosen to bear Sylaise’s mark over his left eye, but had wailed when the Keeper reached the delicate skin underneath it. She had stopped immediately, her expression sorrowful, and said, “Ghilas.” An imperative: Go. Get up. Leave.

By morning, he had disappeared, his few belongings presumably taken to trade in a shemlen city.

“He didn’t have to,” Ellana had said to the Keeper. “He could have waited until next year and tried again.”

“Yes,” Deshanna had said, “but do you not remember how you hid your laurel marks? You were ashamed of them.”

Ellana had nodded, the specter of that feeling a nauseous roil in her middle.

“His would not fade in that year,” Deshanna had continued, “as yours did in a week.”

That night, Ellana had taken the sharp edge of a stick and pressed it under her eye at the place where the boy’s will had broken. Tears of her own had welled as it pierced her there, but she had not uttered a sound.

Nor had the girl who took Elgar’nan’s markings the following spring. She had declared her intentions with a tale of his intervention on her behalf: his strength and righteous fury when she had crossed swords with unfriendly humans on the road—a common enough story among their people. But her endurance under the Keeper’s knife had been uncommonly great; hours in unflinching stillness as half her face had been blackened to honor him. The other was twined with thorny vines: the most elaborate and excruciating vallaslin.

All young Dalish, on the day they were to be marked, recounted in reverential detail the moment they had chosen their god: hunting accidents narrowly avoided and prayers of thanks offered to Andruil; a childhood fever vision in which Dirthamen appeared; watching the difficult birth of a baby, surely saved by Mythal’s grace.

Ellana too awaited the Creators’ favor. Yet, as her seventeenth year approached, there had been no great revelation. She could craft nothing worthy of June, and could not claim to augur as the chosen of Falon’Din did. She was poorly suited to Andruil’s bow and Sylaise’s weaving.

For a short time she considered taking Elgar’nan’s markings in wildish spite—to prove she was not daunted by the fear his name had struck into her after the misstep with the laurel ink. By the same token, she might have taken Mythal’s, for her protection that day. However, she’d had no desire to be reminded of those unhappy memories at every glimpse of her reflection, and had put the notion aside.

There remained then only Ghilan’nain, the mother of halla, the wright of their aravels, the guide for all Dalish in their ways through life. The path Ellana walked was a decided one—to be First, and then someday Keeper—but her stumbling progress could benefit from the goddess’s guiding hand.

So, on a dry night in midsummer, she had presented offerings in solitude: a polished antler and an arrangement of aromatic grasses and herbs, which she burned in a bowl while she bathed to purify her body and mind.

Kneeling at the center of a circle of her clan, delicate curls of the vallaslin were placed at her brow and chin. She endured it mutely, grinding her teeth against the sting of the blade. When it was done, the Keeper had bade her rise. “Ghilan’nain enansal. You are of the People.”

And so she was, though she couldn’t claim the favor she’d sought; her gifts with magic had remained inadequate, the track toward First more root-riddled and overgrown than ever, tripping her up while Hathaan loped ahead. But she held no grudge against Ghilan’nain, for some causes were hopeless, even for gods—or had been, until Fen’Harel.

Seated at the Keeper’s worktable in an otherwise empty aravel, Ellana wiped the gritty prophet’s laurel poultice she had been preparing from her fingers and brought them to the side of her neck, under her ear, where her loosely braided hair concealed the touch. A whisper of memory—Fen’Harel’s golden head between her knees—had spellwork energy pulsing from her hand to sensitize the deepest sinews, plucking them like so many harp strings to make her resonate with the magic he’d taught.

Her free hand she flattened on the table, leaning into it as she fed the spell more: long fingers tracing her thigh to leave a glistening trail—from her desire or his mouth, she couldn’t be sure; perhaps it was both. Pleasure arched down her back, tendrils following the bars of her ribs to snap like mage lightning across her chest. She caught a moan in the back of her throat before it escaped.

She had not been so restrained earlier, in the nippy hush of predawn, when she’d slipped out of her bed while the stars could still light her way from the center of the clan’s encampment to the northern edge, where a lone guardian kept watch. She had seated herself at its stone paws, tucked under its chin, her breath clouding and lingering to make a dewy halo about her head as she worked spell-lit hands beneath her clothes. A fractured, unfinished invocation had cut through the morning quiet as she came: “Fen—!” Wolf: fervid, predacious, but not dreadful.

At the worktable, she splayed her hand along her neck, where he had nuzzled her the first night they’d met, and steered the magic down her belly, then lower. The heated coil of it throbbed between her legs, sure to bring release if she practiced more. Just a little more, paired with recollections of the adept push and pull of Fen’Harel’s fingers within her, the freckles on his cheeks standing out under a flush, the tip of his tongue at the ring in his lip as he took all she offered. She dreamed of tracing the delicate gold with her own tongue, and of tasting herself behind his teeth.

The poultice in its wooden bowl went skittering across the table as she jerked against it, lips clamped tight to hold back a cry at her peak. Fen, Fen, her heartbeat chanted, while she could not.

Languidly, the fever receded, Ellana’s grip on her neck releasing to rub her brow. Outside the aravel, she heard children’s laughter, the clang of the smith’s hammer, afternoon birdsong: the sounds of her clan so near while she had been—

“Creators,” she mumbled, at the recklessness.

“Keeper?”

Ellana sat upright fast enough to dizzy her. It took altogether too long to focus on the figure standing at the threshold: a diminutive man with a thatch of brown hair made lighter by the dust stuck in it. The clan’s carpenter held his right arm in his left, an alarming patch of red on the cloth wrapped around it.

On her feet in an instant, Ellana asked, “Lethallin, what happened?”

The carpenter didn’t move to offer the arm, rather looking into the shadowed belly of the aravel and then around it, searching. “Is Deshanna not here? Or Hathaan?”

The nervous question banished Ellana’s lingering hum of climax in a jolt of old hurt. He sought the best healers, of which she was not one.

Two days ago, she would not have demurred, offering him an elfroot brew to manage the pain while he waited for the Keeper to return from her errand, but a silken voice in ancient Elvhen murmured at the back of her mind: You can mend it. I will show you how.

Fen’Harel’s assurance carried with it a ripple in the Veil, not visible, even to Ellana’s keen eye, but palpable as a flutter across her nape—and the carpenter’s. He shivered, turning an imploring, if bewildered gaze, on her.

“I can tend to it." When she approached to gauge the damage, the carpenter didn’t shy back. Beneath the bloodstained cloth was an angry furrow between the thumb and forefinger. “A slip of your chisel?” Ellana asked.

He nodded. “I can’t move it. If that’s not set to rights, I can’t…” Looking away, he trailed off.

Ellana could guess his meaning. He needed use of the whole hand for his trade. Even a minute loss would be a handicap, and the whole clan would suffer for it. “Come and sit,” she said, indicating the mossy ground beside the aravel. The light was better there, even if muzzy from a scug of gray cloud above.

He did, cross-legged before her, while she knelt to cradle the damaged hand in her lap. The wound was not so long as Fen’Harel’s cut had been, but deeper and more ragged. The carpenter’s thumb twitched, and he winced.

“Take a breath,” Ellana said. As he sucked in air, she sought the gaps in the Veil, drawing a stream of potent magic from beyond it to guide into the ugly fissure. She envisioned so many thousands of threads knitting the sundered muscle and flesh. The carpenter gave a small whimper, and she said, “Don’t look. Tell me what you were making. Before this.”

“A-A bowl. Or the start of one. I’ve made a hundred. I shouldn’t have slipped.”

“What kind of bowl? How big was it?” Ellana spoke quickly, and not just to shift his attention from the moment of injury; it was more difficult to maintain the spell outside the shrine, and she could already feel the strain of effort between her shoulder blades and under her vallaslin.

“How big?” said the carpenter, befuddled. “Well, big enough to eat from, I suppose. And—”

He went on, though Ellana heard little more than mutters. Her own blood was rushing in her ears, sweat beading at her hairline. The Veil threatened to seal tight as she delved through it, and for the first time, she understood Fen’Harel’s disdain for its hold on the raw Fade. If what he said of Arlathan was true—that magic was free—she envied him, and longed to see him work spells unfettered.

Plying the Veil a last time, she gathered a strand of irascible Fade energy and bullied it into the carpenter’s hand. The threads of healing magic glowed, drawing torn edges together and smoothing them into a fine line that shone momentarily green before dimming to silvery white. Ellana released the spell, not quite able to hide the weary rounding of her back.

But she had succeeded. She had healed a wound she would not have been able to manage without Fen’Harel’s tutelage, and from the wide-eyed way the carpenter was surveying the result, he was as astounded as she.

“Can you move it now?” Ellana asked.

He flexed the fingers, made a fist. “It is as if nothing happened at all. There’s barely even a scar! How could you—” He halted, peering at her as his face went scarlet. “I mean...ma serannas, lethallan.”

“You’re welcome,” said Ellana. “Is there anything more you need?”

He chewed his cheek. “I had hoped to bring my tools to the Keeper soon. To have their fire wards renewed.”

Ellana couldn’t recall when last Deshanna had laid those wards with her apprentices looking on, but such a minor, if essential, spell could not be so difficult to puzzle out. She ventured, “I’ll do that.”

The carpenter’s smile stretched broadly. “I would’ve had to wait another week for the Keeper to do so many.”

“Ah,” Ellana said, confidence flagging, “well, I’ll renew as many as I can before supper. I can ask her to help with the others—”

“Don’t trouble her,” said the carpenter. “Take the time you need. I trust you’ll see it done, Ellana.” He rose then, inclined his head, and was off in long strides.

Alone once more, Ellana let her arms hang limp, her head falling back to face the sky. A rumble of thunder warned her to shelter before one of the short but torrential autumn storms broke loose, but she lingered on her knees, a grin preceding a barked laugh that brimmed with joy—and gratitude, as luminous as her first veilfire rune, for the favor of a god was hers at last.

The laurel poultice had been spooned into a clay jar and added to the store of other ready medicines, leaving Ellana to tidy up the leavings of her work, when a sodden figure came bustling into the dry interior of the aravel. Hathaan pushed lank curls of black hair out of his eyes, their ends dripping rainwater down his temples. The expression he wore was no less turbulent than the storm.

Ellana took a graying towel from a wooden peg and tossed it to him. “I’d have thought you’d be back before the worst of it."

“So did I,” said Hathaan,“but Deshanna sent me looking for bloody felandaris.” He took a satchel from over his shoulder and spilled its contents onto the table: bunches of cleanly cut elfroot, a straggly length of ghoul’s beard, and leafless, tangled shoots the color of ash. Even at a distance, Ellana could catch their spicy aroma—the very same that came with Fen’Harel’s arrival through the eluvian.

“She should’ve let me do that.”

Hathaan, shedding his surcoat, grunted. “I know. You never fail to find the places where the Veil is thinnest, and the damned stuff only grows there.”

Ellana reached for a piece, wary of the thorns. “What does she need it for?”

“Cold tonics,” came the reply. “For the winter.”

While the Free Marches’ season was not half as frigid as that in Ferelden, or even southern Orlais, a vial of tonic could save a hunter’s fingers or toes if they were caught out in it. Ellana had always liked the smell of those tinctures. “It could’ve waited,” she said, “until I could go.”

“The task needed doing,” Hathaan said, “and I was here.” He lifted his eyebrows. “What kept you this morning, anyway?”

Ellana set the shoot down again, slowly. “I overslept.”

“Strange. I thought you had gone to bed early last night. I didn’t see you fireside after supper.”

Lies didn’t come easily to her, or well, and two in succession had her fumbling. “I…went for a walk.”

“After dark?” asked Hathaan, cocking his hip as he folded arms across his chest.

His glib tone earned him a snapped, “Is there something the matter with enjoying the moonlight?”

“Of course not, but last night was a new moon. No light to speak of.”

Ellana hadn’t marked that in the glow of the veilfire she’d borne, more attentive to the arrows marking her way to Fen’Harel’s shrine. The palm she’d cut to summon him tingled with awareness of ambient magic in the aravel, a temptation to call it into snapping flame. But when she sparked a spell in the cup of her hand, it was the red-orange of common fire.

“I didn’t want for the moon,” she said.

Hathaan’s hawkish nose and hollow cheeks were made sharp in the light, his surprise unconcealed. “So it would seem.”

Ellana rolled the flame in her fingers, throwing shadows across the oiled skins that served as a roof. She watched Hathaan bring his right hand up. Shards of ice crystallized there, hardening along with his eyes.

“With the contest for First so close,” he said, “we should be training more. Together, and opposed. The Keeper doesn’t like to set us at odds, and I don’t want to be, but”—a long look at Ellana, neither doleful nor combative, but somewhere in between—“we are, aren’t we?”

Icy fog emanated from his hand while the fire in hers heated the air. The scent of felandaris was all around.

“Yes,” she said quietly.

Hathaan sighed through his nostrils. “Then you’ll spar with me tomorrow.”

“We’ll have to ask Deshanna for permission,” said Ellana.

“She’ll grant it. She knows as well as we do what’s coming, and the clan should have the best.” An arrogant man would’ve puffed his chest then, ruffling his feathers for show, but Hathaan simply waited for Ellana’s reply.

She kept her flame burning steadily, no concession or threat, and said, “Tomorrow, then.”

Footfalls on the wooden ramp into the aravel came over the percussion of rain against the skins. Ellana and Hathaan turned to see the carpenter bearing a sizable iron-bound chest, the hood of his cloak raised to fend off the weather. 

“Aneth ara,” he said as Hathaan made space for him to enter. To Ellana: “I’ve brought them, lethallan.”

“You can set them there,” said Ellana, pointing to a spot next to the table while Hathaan peered between her and the carpenter. She asked, “Your hand?”

“As new,” he replied, setting the chest down. “You have my thanks, for that and for the tools.” Brushing her shoulder with the hand she’d healed, he said, “Take the time you need.” With a nod to Hathaan, he disappeared again.

Hathaan’s pointed stare demanded explanation, but Ellana said only, “I told him I’d renew the fire wards on his tools. Do you remember how they were laid?”

Hathaan pursed his lips. “No. Do you?”

“Barely.” A weak shrug. “But the task needed doing, and I was here.”

That got a chuckle out of Hathaan, and matters of their contest were put aside. “I need to cut up these herbs," he said. "Sit with me?”

It was a thing they had done together countless times: the two apprentices set to different tasks by the Keeper, both in service of the clan. But it was usually Hathaan who was casting the spells and Ellana stripping stems.

Slumping down onto one of the three-legged stools, he said, “Get me a few jars?”

Ellana fetched them and then joined him at the table. The chest at her feet was filled with tools she didn’t recognize, but she drew one out and searched for the waning spell with a touch. It made itself known as mild warmth, which she latched onto, teasing out its elements so that she could infuse it with new power.

Such spellwork was hardly as difficult as healing had been, but she worked steadily, careful to preserve her strength. She would need it tonight, when she asked Fen’Harel for a lesson in magic she could use to win a sparring match.

Chapter Text

The Light of Elvhenan hung midair above its greatest city, a citadel of glinting crystal and gold finials that came to vicious points, like those at the tips of Anaris’s battle staff. He had carried it at the head of the elvhen cavalry in the centuries of their war, the hooves of his hart pounding the dirt and his hair an argent banner. While the battles were long since won, he was never without it, even to receive a guest in his glass-bound banquet hall—excessive for a private audience.

Solas, bare feet soundless on floors of polished milky quartz, passed the length of a dining table for twenty. The high-backed chairs were empty, the place settings gone, save for a hammered pewter plate of cured meats and cheeses, a flagon, and an etched goblet at the head. There, Anaris was draped over an armchair, his staff planted in the thick fur of the bearskin beneath it and gripped in his right hand.

Thick, dark eyebrows set low over almond-shaped eyes; a delicate, upturned nose; and a wide mouth prone to smiling, but not often kindly, greeted Solas as he stopped at two paces; close enough to speak yet beyond striking distance. Not that either of them needed to resort to physical blows. Anaris’s languorous pose did nothing to diminish the staticky power that surrounded him.

“Ah, Wolf,” he said, “good of you to accept my invitation.”

Solas, armed as he had come for a quarrel disguised as courtly banter, felt that opening volley strike home. Whether or not he relished the title, it had been given to him by Elgar’nan, and Anaris’s use of it was an accusation of allegiance.

Back straight, Solas tucked his hands behind him, well away from the dagger he wore in an ornamented sheath across his chest. “It was unexpected. You have not hosted us here in a decade.”

Anaris gave a low, sardonic hum, toying with the embroidered edge of his open-fronted coat. “‘Us.’ You speak of Mythal, of course. Unless you mean that delectable adjutant of yours. How you have not had him in all these years, I cannot begin to fathom.”

Solas’s hackles stayed flat. It was not the first time Felassan’s place at his side and in his house had been twisted to innuendo, and it would not be the last. “I mean the ranks of the firstborn.” He added, “Our friends,” and received a raucous laugh for it.

“Whatever kinship was between us in a shared cause,” said Anaris cuttingly, “it is dead. Unless it was not you sniffing around my servants in the market and offering to pay for accounts of my movements?”

Another stab of defeat at the arch of his ribs kept Solas mute. He had thought his efforts in the last weeks well concealed.

Anaris, sporting a delighted, closed-lipped smile, landed his high-arched feet on the floor and rose to approach. “You have a great many talents, and even more uses for them, but deception is not one.” A jocular tap to the jeweled hilt of Solas’s dagger with his fingernail, but when he glanced up, his eyes blazed red. “If Mythal wishes to know if we will oppose Elgar’nan, you can tell her this: he may be the eldest, but he does not rule us.”

The ends of Anaris’s silver hair cut across Solas’s chin as he stalked to the table and poured a generous helping of red wine into the goblet. He at least shared that taste with Elgar’nan—and with Mythal.

Solas said, “She is only trying to preserve our hard-won peace.”

“Ours?” Anaris scoffed. “No. Hers, and yours, since you struck the final blow.” He drank deep of the wine, drawing a hand across his mouth when he had swallowed. “Regardless, Elgar’nan does not want peace. He seeks dominion. As does Mythal.”

“Never,” said Solas, sharp and fast.

Red faded back to fine brown, Anaris’s eyes were rueful; but when he set his drink aside, the habitual archness returned. “And what of you, Solas?” he asked. “You have pride, but not ambition? A pity. You could be so much more than a scheming witch’s weapon.”

Solas fought the urge to bare his teeth in a snarl worthy of his epithet. “If calling me such is your brand of flattery, you will have to try another tack.”

Anaris said, “It is the truth, and she knows it as well as I. That is why she keeps you leashed.” He tented his long fingers on the tabletop, leaving foggy prints in the shining finish. “But this is about Elgar’nan. You do not like him.”

“Nor do I like you,” said Solas.

“You do not have to. You simply must see what Elgar’nan will make of the empire to know you cannot stomach it any more than I can.” Anaris’s humor dropped away at last. “It will come to war, and soon, if someone does not intervene.”

“It is what Mythal wishes to do,” Solas said. “My task was in service of that.”

Stepping up to him, Anaris brought a hand near his face. Solas’s own hand twitched to knock him away, but he stopped before making contact.

“I was there when she decided to seek your aid,” Anaris said. “I supported it. Such old wisdom could only be a boon as we faced certain defeat. And it was, in its awful way. She made you exactly what we required: beautiful and brilliant, but blind.” Withdrawing his hand, he took a step back. “Go. Give her my message, and leave my servants be.”

Solas watched him sink back into the chair, his hair a gossamer fall over one of its rolled arms. The battle staff had never left his grip, as blatant a warning as any of his words, among them the message: that he and his allies would not suffer Elgar’nan’s rule.

But it was what he had said of intervention that stuck in Solas’s mind. Anaris had no faith that Mythal would do so; his plea, well couched as it was in polite ambiguity, was to Solas. He had ended one war with his lyrium dagger. Could he act now to prevent another?

Leaving the banquet hall, Solas passed into the citadel’s entryway, where mage-fire torches threw white light up the ribbed vaults of the ceiling. Servants bustled through it about their business, wearing sleek golden masks. They did not remove them on errands in Arlathan proper, providing Solas with easy marks for his inquiries. Too easy, it seemed, since Anaris had caught him out. Perhaps the others had, too, albeit keeping their contempt for his gracelessness to themselves. Embarrassment took a wintry grip at the top of his spine, under his unbound hair.

“Will you be departing, Master?” asked a footman, masked and in livery. The question was unneeded, considering he already held Solas’s cloak, but Solas replied, “Yes, thank you,” as he took the cloak and swept it over his shoulders.

In place of the customary doors, a towering eluvian wider than Solas was tall served as an entrance to Anaris’s domain, the only means of travel between a floating keep and the city below. He came to stand before it, the surface shimmering rather than reflective.

It would make the twenty-ninth mirror he had traversed in the four weeks and two days that had passed since the one in Vir Dirthara had borne him to the Dread Wolf’s shrine—not counting the eluvian in it, which had returned him to his bedchamber with the taste of Ellana Lavellan’s desire still on his tongue.

He had not realized how diligently he’d kept that count until the prescribed three weeks had gone and days stacked up behind them. His progress chasing information had then, rather suddenly, required more transits through the Crossroads, but none took him beyond Elvhenan, and the snarl of frustration that sat in his low belly wound itself tighter.

Had Ellana been waylaid? A few hours in her Free Marches could be, for the limited understanding Solas had, many more in Arlathan, but it had been too long an interval. She had duties to her clan; perhaps it was they who kept her from him. He did his utmost not to gnash his teeth resentfully.

He had his own duties, too, though the blatant failure in them blackened his mood. It would be better, he surmised, that Anaris’s great eluvian did not carry him to her just then.

Which it did not. He passed through it in a single long stride, arriving at a gated courtyard in the city’s noble district. Anaris’s armored guards made way for him as he drew the hood of his cloak up over his head.

Yellow leaves drifted from the trees that lined the thoroughfares. They gathered on the pitched roofs of grand houses and softened the rumble of wheeled carts over flagstone, silky underfoot.

Solas had stood in the vibrant litter countless autumns, since the People had come to this forest and laid the foundations of their city. The earth beneath them had still trembled then, with the tempers of the titans, and each tremor had made more turning leaves shiver and fall.

Mythal had brushed them in short, angry sweeps from her shoulders as she paced, telling Solas of the sanctum they could build, if only the world would quiet. He had believed her unequivocally, his friend of many ages, and the tales she had spun were outshone by the true glory of what Elvhenan had become. Yet, he had found beauty in the trembling of the leaves that day, the pulse of the land underfoot—since severed, at his hand.

Rounding the corner of a palatial townhouse into a broader, busier street, Solas cut sharply to the side to avoid catching a hart’s impressive spread of antlers in his chest. The young girl leading it, her curly hair puffed around a dark, oval face, said, “Mind how you go!” It might’ve been for the hart or for Solas.

“My apologies,” he said, keeping the hood low.

The girl waved him off as an inconvenient stranger, pulling on the bridle. It was tooled with flourishes at the browband, the same as those on the girl’s skin. She was no less property than the animal: a slave to one of Falon’Din’s lieutenants raised to nobility.

Solas, peevish, took his hand from his bare brow and resumed his journey past a leaping fountain and into a market. It was smaller than that at the city center, the goods more refined for a clientele in this district.

A silversmith called out the virtues of his metalwork, taught by June during the darkest days of the war. The man’s chin, cheeks, and throat were marked for him. 

Two city guards, complexions dotted with Dirthamen’s crescent, exchanged a few coins for a bowl of candied nuts from a woman with Sylaise’s writhing sigil over her left eye.

Solas slowed by a grocer’s stall, filled with colorful fruit from across the empire, delivered every morning through the Crossroads by countless others of the world-born, who farmed food and made clothes, who served their spirit-born masters at table and in bed. All sealed in bondage by the vallaslin.

He picked a red pomegranate from the peck on display, its inner flesh sure to be pale white and tough around the sweet-sour seeds. The thought of pinching them carefully between thumb and forefinger woke the hunger he had forgotten since breakfast, and he went for the pouch at his belt, heavy with coins.

“How much?” he asked the grocer.

She came to him with a smile, creases at the corners of her eyes to complement her branching vallaslin. She replied with a fair price, adding with a wink, “But you will want more than one, I promise.”

“Is that so?” Solas asked. “And what is the price for the peck, then?”

She tapped her chin with a forefinger, then crooked it to beckon him closer. Charmed by her tactic, he leaned in, affording her a look at his face beneath the hood. Her jesting was banished directly.

She said, too loud, “All that I have is yours, Fen’Harel.”

That name stirred whispers and drew looks from the others in the market. Solas cursed his blunder, but, resigned, put back his hood. The grocer watched him expectantly as he drew his knife and cut into it the pomegranate, cracking the rind. From the white flesh, he took a seed and chewed it slowly. “You are right,” he said. “It is very good.”

The grocer beamed. “You honor us with your custom, Master.”

Solas gave an august incline of his head. “Send a crate of these to my residence. Speak with Felassan.” His friend would ensure the grocer was paid, if she would not accept coin from him.

She made a deep bow, and Solas, his fruit in hand, moved along. Gazes followed him now, unavoidable. He forced himself to walk slowly to the edge of the market, so it didn’t appear that he was fleeing their attention and veneration—even if he was.

The road he followed, picking seeds as he went, took him to a set of iron gates wrought with a blazing sun. Guards, their faces twined with Elgar’nan’s thorns, saluted as he approached. Disposing of the pomegranate as he went through a smaller portal set into the gate, Solas entered sprawling gardens.

A spirit caretaker, emanating joy at its work, glided through a lattice of creeping roses, out of Solas’s path. Behind it, he heard a world-born gardener’s happy greeting, and felt in a reverberation through magic-thick air the familiar wonder of meetings long ago, when Wisdom had twined around an elvhen arm to better understand the form. Mythal had laughed, claiming the tendrils of its being tickled the tender underside of her wrist.

Solas hastened toward the house, past a shaded gazebo. Or nearly past it, since a call of his name brought him up short. Under the shingled roof, Andruil lay on a chaise, her dark hair a braided crown about her head, brown athletic legs exposed by a stout skirt, and breasts bare. Molded against her was another woman, taller and longer of limb yet seemingly small in her adoring deference to her lover: Ghilan’nain, the clever inventor whose creations had distinguished her during the war.

After it, too, as she crafted more outlandish beasts for Andruil’s sport. Such creativity had seen her precipitous rise in influence, until she kept company with gods like she had always been among them.

Diverting from the stone walkway, Solas went to where they reclined.

“What errand,” said Andruil, measuring him with a huntress’s preying interest, “could have you cloaked and armed midday? Is that blood at your fingertips?”

The stains of pomegranate juice were barely visible, a testament to her keen eye on him—on anyone. He asked, “Is Mythal here?”

It was Ghilan’nain who replied. “Maybe. She took breakfast with us before stealing Elgar’nan away for some conference ‘of import.’” With a forefinger, she stroked the swell of Andruil’s breast to the peak, circling it idly.

Solas tracked the motion, but it was not Andruil’s dusky nipple he saw, rather a pink one, pebbled on a fuller breast as he teased it with his thumb. More, his conjured Ellana whispered, Fen’Harel. He adjusted the fall of his cloak to conceal the stirring between his legs.

Canny Andruil marked it, and petted the wings of Ghilan’nain’s shoulders, displaying the rose petal delicacy of her skin in a blatant offer. Ghilan’nain, indolent under Andruil’s caress, nuzzled her neck.

“I shall seek them, then,” said Solas. He started to back away, nearly colliding with an approaching servant; a slip of a girl who deftly navigated around him without upsetting the overfull glasses of mead on the tray she carried. She went in silent steps to the opposite side of the lovers’ chaise and, kneeling, proffered the drinks.

“Will you not stay and have some refreshment?” Andruil asked. “I can send the girl for more.”

Face downturned so that a curtain of black hair concealed it, the servant did not move.

“I must speak with Mythal,” Solas replied.

That earned a scowl from Andruil. She so hated to have a quarry slip her grasp. “If you do not want wine, then perhaps she will tempt you.” Ungently, she brushed the servant’s hair aside and forced her to look up at Solas.

He opened his mouth to chide Andruil for handling the girl roughly, but the words withered as he caught sight of the swirls of vallaslin above her eyebrows, as elegant as the twisted horns of the halla. He had not seen them before in Arlathan, but he knew them well, for they were the same as Ellana’s.

“Allegiances to Ghilan’nain are growing,” Andruil said. “Is their tribute to her not lovely?” She tapped her thumb to the tattooed design on the girl’s chin, and Solas could not help but compare it to Ellana’s more prominent one, jutting somewhat stubbornly in a sturdier jaw. The servant’s features appeared fragile where Ellana’s were round with health.

“Ghilan’nain,” Solas said, at the edge of curt, “do you know of a people called the Dalish?”

Peering up at him from where her head rested on Andruil’s shoulder, she replied, “No.”

“They are not known to the noble houses who pay you tribute?”

“No,” she said again, more interested in her lover’s swooping collarbone than Solas’s questions.

He asked no more, the pomegranate seeds in his gut mixed with consternation. How could it be that Ellana, so far flung from Arlathan and free of bondage, wore vallaslin so new to it? The ink etched into her skin was not fresh; she had been tattooed years before, though how many, Solas did not know.

He bit down on the ring in his lip. He might have discovered more—about her and about the Veil—had he not been so easily diverted by the farce of Fen’Harel. Yet, even as he delivered the familiar reproach, he saw Ellana in the servant girl’s markings, heard her breathless need, remembered the willow bough litheness of her body, and the lash did not fall so hard.

To the entwined lovers on their chaise, he said, “You will excuse me.”

Andruil let go the servant, who became as inert as a side table once more. She lifted her head, perhaps to protest, but a silent, steady pressure of Ghilan’nain’s hand over her middle stayed her. As Solas turned to go, Ghilan’nain put that hand under Andruil’s skirt, and he was surely forgotten.

Elgar’nan’s tastes ran to imposing arches, bright firelight, and sumptuous furnishings to soften the heavy stonework of his residence—one of several throughout Elvhenan, and the most modest; only three times the size of the Solas’s. Despite the scale, it felt closed-in, especially when set against the lightness of Anaris’s citadel.

Solas went down the length of a covered arcade, away from the garden and into the house itself. What few servants he passed bore the thorny vallaslin, and did not meet his eyes as they hurried past. He was, after all, not an uncommon presence, though more often at Mythal’s side before than now.

She and Elgar’nan would have gone to the study for a private conversation, and so Solas made his way toward the back staircase. But voices, huffing with effort, drew him to an open leaf of the banquet hall doors. Inside, a pair of burly servants were placing a gilt chair upon the dais. Solas watched them position it, sweat at their temples, before making way for another pair bearing a second seat, a wicked spire as the apex of the backrest.

“It suits her perfectly.”

Solas started, and rued it, since he should not have forgotten how quietly Elgar’nan could move for a man of his size. He peered down from under a heavy forehead, his eyes small and jaw square. A circlet of gold rested at his brow, a spherical ruby inlaid at the center. The hair on his head, mane-thick for as long as Solas had known him, was beginning to thin at the edges: the singular hint at his age.

“I need to speak with her,” Solas said.

Elgar’nan cut one of his widest smiles, nothing charitable in it. “You have come too late. She rises early, regardless of her impressive energy in the night.”

The words, so laden with insinuation, struck Solas across the cheek. Mythal’s vigor had not been turned on Elgar’nan in a millennium, or so she had told Solas archly, as she had led him into her rooms. He had followed, matching her scorn, but that too had been centuries ago. If she went to Elgar’nan’s bed again, what more did they share?

Smothering the reprise of Anaris’s warnings, Solas asked, “Has she gone home?”

“She did not tell me her destination,” Elgar’nan replied. He watched the servants finish with the garish chairs, smugness curving the sides of his mouth upward. “She comes and goes as she pleases. Her will cannot be constrained.”

A fact Solas knew well, and had never challenged. Elgar’nan, however, had in the past attempted blunt intimidation, as unsubtle as the display in his hall; but Mythal had outmaneuvered him each time. Well-aimed flattery was a trap he invariably fell into, and while Solas could not bear to court him with it, she did—and well.

After one spectacular victory she had led Elgar’nan to in the ugliest days of the war, Solas had paced their shared tent and scoffed at how, for all his bluster, he was malleable in the right hands. Mythal, embracing Solas wordlessly, had petted his hair until he calmed.

“That will,” Elgar’nan went on, “is meant to steward the empire. At my side.”

The seats on the dais loomed, and in their shadow, Solas’s objection came with less certainty than it had to Anaris: “She would not war with our own people for that. I was asked to—”

“I know what she asked of you,” Elgar’nan interjected. “Scuttling around Arlathan, cajoling slaves and playing at being a spy.” He sneered. “A fool’s errand. You are no deceiver. But you are shrewd and force your nose where it does not belong…if you are not kept occupied.”

Solas’s locked knees had numbed his ankles, pins and needles then creeping their way up his thighs. “You were never going to negotiate a peace.” He all but choked on it, for he did not mean Elgar’nan alone. “What of the others? Falon’Din, Dirthamen, Sylaise.” Andruil and her lover he omitted. War was a hunt, at which she was very skilled, and Ghilan’nain, for all her once-gentle temperament, would follow her without question. “Are they convinced to take up arms for you?”

“They needed no convincing,” Elgar’nan said, and made of fist of his left hand. “They understand that the empire requires the strongest to guide it. And they will benefit.”

Disgust rose like bile in Solas’s gorge. “Greater wealth and comfort, more sycophants and slaves,” he spat. “To what end?”

Elgar’nan spread his arms wide, filling the hall with a declaration: “To be masters of this world. It is why we crafted these forms, what we shed our blood to possess.”

“Blood we stole,” Solas said. His pumped through his veins, thick as oil and ready to ignite.

“Spare me your wailing,” Elgar’nan growled. He advanced a step, forcing Solas, who was not a small man, to look up to see the purpling of rage in his face. “If Mythal did not favor you so, I would have disposed of you after your usefulness to me was served.”

“I did not do it for you!” cried Solas.

“No,” Elgar’nan said, deliberately hushed after the thunderclap of Solas’s voice. “You did it for her, and now you will embrace her ascent, or be destroyed.”

The ambient magic that surrounded them charged with malice as Solas pulled it to his fingers. He had wielded such spells to fell titans and savage armies. Elgar’nan was one man. His war could be stopped with a single blow, if Solas could land it.

But from the set of his shoulders and the ferocious swell of power around them, he spoiled for a fight, and Solas doubted even Mythal could stand against him in full form. With the others—with her—at his flanks, Elvhenan would come to heel.

Releasing the magic, Solas ground out, “I will hear it from her lips before I believe what you claim.”

Elgar’nan rumbled a disdainful laugh. “Run to her skirts, Dread Wolf—under them if you must, but you will not find soft meats there. She is not a coward, like you.” A jerk of his head toward the doors. “Get out.”

Solas went, heels striking the flagstones in hard shocks with every step. The lances of pain accompanied him deeper into the house, not back toward the gardens, where he might meet Andruil and Ghilan’nain again, or the city beyond. He could not abide the gawking—the reverence paid him that he did not seek, and did not deserve.

Upon reaching the heavy oak door he sought, he wretched it open, charged in, and was surrounded by his own frantic expression. Eluvians lined the walls, reflecting him and each other in disorienting, repeating corridors. None were marked, but in the end it did not matter where he went, as long as it was away. The stagnant air of Elgar’nan’s house was stifling, the snare of politicking tight around his throat. Heartbeat a frenzied drum, Solas lurched toward the nearest mirror and through:

To chilly stones against the soles of his feet and free air that braced his lungs. He gasped for it, clawing at the clasp of his cloak to slough the heavy fabric off his back. As it pooled behind him, he set palms against shaking thighs. The panic that had gripped him receded by meager inches, until he could hear more than the pounding of his pulse.

“Fen’Harel.”

The title, which Elgar’nan had so acidly thrown at him and the market grocer had used in deference, came accented and soft with concern. Solas swallowed a despairing sound—partway to laughter but closer, he feared, to a sob—at cruel timing, and raised to his head to find Ellana Lavellan before him, her vallaslin curling over anxious gray eyes.

Chapter Text

“Fen’Harel?” Ellana said again, more urgent when Solas did not reply. “Are you all right?” The customary question, albeit unneeded; the answer was in his rounded back, his hands braced on his thighs, and the audible drags of his breath. Heavy and muddled as his head was, he could neither shake it nor nod—simply hold it up enough to watch as Ellana hurried from nearby the eluvian to the foot of the altar.

She stooped to gather something, her footfalls silent as she came to Solas’s side and offered it: a skin pouch, uncorked. “Water,” she said.

Solas took it by the neck and, standing taller, put it to his mouth. Coolness spilled down his throat, over a thick, tacky tongue. He swallowed gratefully, coming aware enough to stop before he drained it all. “Ma serannas,” he said, yet strained, if not choked. As he had struggled to slow his breathing, he had not trusted his voice to keep from cracking.

“Ma nuvenin,” said Ellana. Accepting the pouch from him, she took a drink of her own. 

It offered Solas a veilfire-lit glimpse of her gently sloping jaw and the chin he’d envisioned in the garden, marked with fine black ink. The flourishes of vallaslin at her brow were not an exact match for Ghilan’nain’s servant girl, but too similar to mistake for anything else.

The puzzle of them, and of the Veil and the discontinuity of time between the shrine and Arlathan, pushed at his lingering distress, unsated curiosity ready to take its place. Felassan would have teased him for it; how easily his mind was steered to study from any other pursuit. He heard Anaris’s droll indictment, too: You have a great many talents, but deception is not one. Indeed, if Elgar’nan was to be believed, Solas, in his service to Mythal’s supposed peace, had been the one deceived.

Distress must have shown in his face, for Ellana asked, “Do you need to sit down?” She looked to the tattered remains of the cloak he had left on his first visit, then to the one puddled behind him. Both were better than the naked flagstones, grounding as their chill was through his feet.

“I would not refuse a seat,” he replied, and started to reach for the cloak he had shed.

“I’ll do that,” said Ellana, darting to pick it up. The stirring of the air as she passed close, but without touching him, raised the hairs on Solas’s arms. She laid the cloak out near one of the braziers filled with warm veilfire and knelt on it, leaving a place for him to join her.

When he did, glad of the firm ground under his backside, she passed the pouch to him a second time. He drank and she did not speak, but the asking was in her eyes: what on the other side of an unmarked mirror could shake the Dread Wolf so?

Solas rolled the mess of anger and fear Elgar’nan had wrought in his mouth with another gulp of water, tasting the acrid plays of power. He might have spat them out, but would not sully the shrine—or Ellana—with travails better left in Arlathan. And even if her Free Marches lay beyond the borders of the empire, there was no wisdom in revealing the squabbles of its stewards. Swallowing, Solas slid the water and his burdens into the pit of his stomach.  

“Tell me,” he said to Ellana, “is this your tomorrow? As we agreed?” Above them, at the ragged edges of the sinkhole, the forest was night-black. It had been midafternoon in Arlathan.

“Yes,” she replied, “but later than yesterday. I had to wait until the Keeper was finished with her story after supper. I’m expected to be there. When I wasn’t last night, Hathaan noticed.”

The rival apprentice. His name had drifted at some point from Solas’s memory, but she invoked it with the same forbidding gravity as she had the contest for First.

Ungenerous—and unwarranted, since Solas knew next to nothing of this Hathaan—dislike had him flaring his nostrils. “And you do not wish for him to know that you have been here with…” A god? Hardly, when he had barely stopped trembling. “With a man?”

Three fetching wrinkles appeared above the bridge of Ellana’s nose. “A man? You mean a-a lover?”

Her stumbling Elvhen proved so sweet that Solas felt less a fool for having implied it; and he had, though he knew full well that within the bounds of their unusual arrangement they were not lovers.

Ellana continued, “Hathaan wouldn’t care about that. We’re not— He’s not—” She made a small sound of revulsion.

“Ir abelas,” Solas said. “I did not intend to grieve you.”

Ellana rested her hands on her knees, both of them undamaged, Solas saw. The ritual dagger was sheathed at her belt. If she had used it to spill her blood on the altar and bring him to her, she had healed the evidence before he had come through the eluvian. A mage-fire flicker of pride, and of appetite, lit under his breastbone.

“Hathaan might as well be my brother,” Ellana said. “And clan mages don’t bond, anyway. Not with each other.”

Solas lifted his eyebrows. “‘Bond?’” The word had many meanings in Arlathan, but none of them a matter of lovers, or siblings.

Ellana’s upper teeth pressed into her lip, reddening it prettily. “A union?” she ventured. “Two people who vow to be together for—” A pause, searching, and then: “For always.”

Bellanaris. She said it more fluidly than the rest, as if it belonged in her mouth. It was rarely in Solas’s, since always stretched before every one of the People, undying. Ellana lent it a weight he did not recognize.

“Do many of your people make these bonds?” he asked.

“Almost all of them. Is that not your way as well?”

Solas shook his head. “Fidelity to a lover can be asked for, but is not expected, and there are no vows sworn to seal such an agreement.”

Especially by the firstborn. The entanglements among them in the long ages were rife with as many grudges as joys, though fortunately no petty jealousies when one lover’s eye wandered to another. Only Ghilan’nain and Andruil had stayed true to one another, but their bed was open to others, not least of all Solas, as had been made clear to him in the garden.

Unease went down his back like pointed nails tracing his spine as he considered a bond of his own, but perhaps if he and the others had made something like them, they would not be at the cusp of war.

“Will you,” he said to Ellana, “make a bond?”

She inhaled, head held high, and fixed Solas with steady resolve. “Only if I’m First.”

Around her shoulders, the Veil made a shimmering mantle, limning her in emerald. Gooseflesh stippled over Solas’s chest, beneath his shirt and the bejeweled dagger strapped over it. The barrier, with its tightly knitted spells, reacted to her power, rippling with conviction. He had never encountered such complex magic so eager to respond to a mage without being bound to them. The eerie threads of the Veil slithered over Ellana, responsive and seeking, but not hers to command.

Fascinated, Solas set the water skin aside and followed one, leaning toward her. It faded from view as he brushed past it to touch the tip of her ear. Weeks of waiting, the trials of Anaris and Andruil and Elgar’nan, his panicked flight—it all evaporated in her proximity, in the minute tremble at his caress.

“Is that why you did not want Hathaan to know where you were going?” he asked. “Our lessons?”

She nodded. “If he found out, he would want to learn, too.”

Solas traced the underside of her ear with his knuckles, the cartilage tensile but strong. “That,” he said, “would require my willingness to teach him.”

“You wouldn’t?” said Ellana. In her face was a glow of avarice—the prideful brand he had hankered to see. She wanted him, and his lessons in magic, for herself; for her own gain as well as for her clan’s.

“No,” he said as he put her hair aside to cup her cheek. “What has he to offer, that I do not already have?”

Her breath, warm and wetter than the night air, floated across the front of Solas’s neck, and she shifted forward, sitting on her heels. It took a force of will for Solas to keep his eyes off the furrow between her breasts that the neckline of her shirt teased. Instead, he pressed his thumb to her cheekbone and asked, “What do you want of me tonight, Ellana?”

He was given a slow blink over darkened eyes: confusion, or at least not full comprehension. His choice of words, upon reflection, was more equivocal than he might have intended. He had sought to know what magic she wished to learn, but it could just as easily have been whispered foreplay; a nuance of Elvhen that Ellana did not grasp.

With her finally real under his hands again, and not a specter he chased through sparkling mirrors, the opportunity was ripe to teach her that second meaning. His desire was stirring, superseding even the mysteries of vallaslin and the Veil. It demanded, in hungry snaps of the wolf’s jaws, that he draw her into his lap, seat her on his folded legs, and hold her against him until she felt exactly how much he wanted her.

But it was that that halted him. She had come to learn, stealing away through the darkness for it, not for his rut.

Taking his hand from her face, he said, “What will our lesson be tonight?”

That she understood, and rolled her weight back—away from Solas. “There’s going to be a sparring match tomorrow. Hathaan and I.”

“Combat spells?” He was, for a moment, in Elgar’nan’s hall again, hate-filled magic swirling between them. It was a frigid wash over his lust.

“Only if you see fit,” said Ellana, in haste to defer when she thought she had displeased him. He was that, but not on account of her. “Unless,” she added, “you don’t fight.”

Old pain tasted of iron and smelled of wet fur. Hard rain and ten score feet turning a meadow to bloody mud beneath his claws, and then naked soles, when he had no longer been able to sustain the wolf’s form.

“I do,” Solas said, “if I must, but I take no pleasure in it.”

“Then we won’t—”

He raised a hand, striking her silent. “We will, if it will help you. What are the rules of this match?”

“It’s about defending the clan,” Ellana replied.

“From whom?”

“The shems, usually.” That word—quick—Solas recognized, but not the use, and she went on before he could ask after it. “They’re not often mages, but the Keeper doesn’t allow the hunters to shoot arrows at us, so the matches are spellwork. A strike is one point. Five to win.”

Not so far off a young mage’s training in Arlathan, though never Solas’s. He had won his bouts when the shivering durgen’len captives, dragged from their pen for his practice, lay dead.

Gathering his hair into a tail and knotting it around itself to lie against his shoulders, he said, “Very well. I will defend first.”

Ellana balked, motionless as a startled halla. “You want me to fight you?”

He did not pause in unbuckling the sheath across his chest, making to discard the ornamental dagger—unneeded in a sparring match. “Is that not what you wanted?”

“Yes, but…I thought you would show me the spells.”

“How can I decide what to show,” said Solas, “if I do not know what you are already capable of?” By the pulling in of her vallaslin, Ellana was not convinced. “You will not hurt me, if that is your concern.” She shot him a look so curdled with disbelief that he nearly laughed. Getting to his feet, he said, “Come, Ellana. Attack me, so that I may learn your limits.”

He left her to rise alone, going to set the sheathed dagger at the paws of the wolf statue. He rolled the sleeves of his shirt up to his elbows.

Ellana was waiting at the center of the shrine when he turned. His cloak had been laid aside and she held in her right hand a length of rich dark wood, lacquered to a sheen but humble when set against the bone-and-gold staff Anaris carried. She hefted it with the ease of practice, but chewed the inside of her cheek, betraying nerves.

Solas could say nothing to put her at ease—he knew it, having stood opposite fearsome opponents of his own—and neither was consolation called for; it did nothing to foster the courage she needed to face not him, but Hathaan. She would only believe herself capable when Fen’Harel proved it to her.

Stopping at six paces, Solas took a ready stance and said, “You may begin.”

The air in the room heated, but the ball of fire she conjured in her left hand was muted and thrown at him with middling precision. He barely had to raise a spellwork shield; it had almost gone out by the time it reached him. Her face fell.

“Ellana,” Solas said, crisp, “there is a great well of potential in you.” He had felt it under her collarbone on the first night. “Trust it, and do not hold back.”

The Veil shivered as she pierced it to draw magic to her. Solas sensed through the infinitesimal gap restless energies scrabbling to break free. There were spirits there, wrathful and anguished in their confinement. Need to ease their suffering turned his stomach, but their voices were cut off as a mightier flame unfurled in Ellana’s grip. Solas sought the same constrained magic to block the attack. It popped and fizzled against his barrier.

“More,” he said, a whip-crack command in Elvhen.

Ellana spun her staff, arcing a bolt of lightning from the crystal atop it, caged in bronze. Solas diverted it with a gesture, then spoke in her tongue: “More.”

She gave it, with fire and snapping bolts in too-regular rotation: an exploitable weakness of technique. Solas let her attack again and again, learning her tells. When she pulled the staff back following a luminous flash of lightning, he sent an answering one toward her.

She yelped, but extended her free hand to erect a desperate barrier in time to block it. “Fenedhis!” she cried, along with something in her language he did not follow.

Solas lowered his arms; a suspension of hostilities to permit her to recover. Breathing hard, she leaned on the staff. “Well done,” he said. “You can think on your feet in a fight.”

“I didn’t have much of a choice,” she rejoined sourly.

Solas said, “We rarely do, once the battle has begun.” Choosing to enter the fray at all was another matter, and a choice he had made to aid a friend, unknowing of what was to come.

Ellana straightened, pique faded as she marked his sobriety. “What’s next?”

“You must strengthen your spells,” he said. “And then we must break you of using them in a prescribed order. Is that how you were taught?”

Her cheeks were pink, and not from exertion. “It helped me keep them straight when I was little. It’s a bad habit, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Solas. “Predictability is dangerous. I anticipated you too easily, and no doubt Hathaan will as well.”

Chin mulishly forward, Ellana widened her stance. The butt of her staff thunked on the dull flagstones. Had she been armored, a helm upon her head, she might well have stood beside Solas at the crest of a hill a thousand years ago, leading a host of soldiers against the Stone.

He went to her, curling his hand around the staff. “You will not need this. It is a focus, but not a crutch. The force of the spells must come from you.”

Ellana relinquished it one finger at a time, until Solas could bear it to the altar to join his dagger. When he returned to her, he held out his empty hands and she laid hers palm-up in them.

“We will draw magic together. Watch what I do, how I build the spell. Then you will shape it yourself. Do you understand?”

“I do.”

In spite of the Veil’s hindrance, Solas gathered the needed energies to him and, shaping each diaphanous stream, layered them step by painstaking step. The emerald shade lit Ellana’s face from below, her features fair but taut in concentration. When the spellwork was complete, he held it in stasis: the promise of a torrent of flame before it erupted.

“Do you feel that?” he asked. “The power lying in wait? You cast your spells before they are fully formed. Build one like this and barriers will tear like wet paper.”

“But it takes so long,” Ellana said, studying the unsettled glow they cradled in their joined hands.

Solas traced the fine tendon of her thumb with his forefinger. “Not with practice.” She wore excitement plainly. He offered a muted smile in return before dispelling the magic and dimming the room. Ellana, to her credit, did not start. Solas said, “Can you do it?”

“Yes.”

“Then show me.”

She worked slower but no less artfully. While she, as world-born, would never wield magic as the spirit-born did, the result was countless times more potent than her earlier attempt. When she was finished, her eyes reflected the strength of the spell.

“Throw it,” Solas said. “Upward.”

They both tipped their heads back to watch the mass of magic rise and burst into orange flame at the lip of the sinkhole. To Solas’s satisfaction, it was Ellana who raised a barrier above them. Liquid fire rolled over it and down, extinguished on the stone floor.

“Very good,” he told her, and the wide smile she wore commanded his full attention.

For as many nights and in as many permutations as he had imagined her in the past weeks, he had not contemplated a kiss. His lips at her ears, her collarbone, the insides of her thighs and between them, but not her mouth. To see it now, so enticingly bowed and the same blush shade as her nipples, the omission seemed absurd. Yet, he could follow the deep roots of misgiving to their source: she gave herself to him in exchange for his knowledge, and despite the intimacies he had already claimed, a kiss was one he could not justify.

Still, that reminder did not quash the sudden yearning to pull her in, duck his head, and take it.

Perhaps she saw something of that hunger in his expression. The smile shrank, but her lips stayed parted, her body motionless—expectant—until the collapse of the barrier in a hissed sputter dropped a last bit of fire uncomfortably close to Solas’s toes.

“Ir abelas,” she said hastily. “I should have been watching.”

“Take a breath,” said Solas, and not entirely for her. “Clear your head, then we will start with the next spell.”

Lightning, ice, charged energy: he demonstrated each, and Ellana mimicked him to make richly layered spells of her own. Solas cursed the poor teachings of her people; she was far more than they knew—so much more with him. 

“Will that be enough to win your match?” he asked as she carefully collapsed a fitful ball of magic.

“More than enough,” she replied. “Ma serannas, Fen’Harel.”

“Do not thank me yet. You must put the spells to use.” A cautious amendment as he took in the sheen at her brow, making the vallaslin stand out: “Unless you are too tired.”

Ellana asked, “Am I allowed to use my staff?”

“If you will have it in the match, yes.” At her nod, Solas went to collect her weapon from the altar. Simply made as it was, it had good weight and balance. He said as much to Ellana.

“I would tell our armorer you said so,” she replied, “but he wouldn’t believe me. And”—she took hold of the staff under where he grasped it, lightly touching the side of his hand—“my people are wary of the Dread Wolf.”

Solas kept his grip on the staff, holding her near. “Are you?”

Three restive heartbeats passed in the pause before she answered. “A little, but I’m not afraid.”

Anguish pricked the back of his skull for even that small apprehension, but she still thought him a god, and if the others who purported to be that were any measure, she had good reason to beware.

Letting go of the staff and putting the appropriate space between them for a bout, Solas said, “I will call the spells. Do as I say, not as you are used to.”

Ellana took up a fighter’s posture, and when Solas ordered ice, she gave it.

He moved about the shrine, forcing her to pivot and pace to keep up with him. The magic required to block her spells was no strain, but the short sprints from one wall to another, fast turns, and dodges warmed him. His shirt stuck in the damp patches between his pectorals and at the back of his neck. Ellana was flushed and panting, but she did not relent.

The speed with which she crafted the spells grew with each one cast. Her hair swung around her, her steps as graceful as a huntress’s. Solas watched her spin the staff ably, and felt the weight of arousal in his lower belly. War was rarely seductive—battle-fueled coupling in the thrill of victory notwithstanding—but the game he and Ellana played was not so grim, and she was beautiful.

In his momentary distraction, he nearly missed the fireball she threw without his command. It struck the center of his barrier, right at the level of his eyes, in a burst of sparks that made him flinch.

“Point!” Ellana cried, planting her staff as elation rolled off her in waves that stirred the Veil.

Solas should have allowed her to relish her triumph and called an end to the match, but instead he conjured a retaliatory ball of energy, delaying just long enough for her to recognize his intention. She threw the staff out in front of her, a barrier springing to life before the spell struck. It was not a quarter strength, but she skidded backward under the barrage.

Solas’s zeal iced over. Afraid he had pushed her too far, he started toward where she stood. He was not halfway when the barrier dropped and she was advancing, her left hand aglow. His own barrier caught the snarling lightning, and he broke into a fervid grin at her mettle. But rather than repay her with a spell in such close quarters, he crowded her toward the wall. The crystal in her staff shone as she moved to defend herself, but he grasped it hard and twisted the staff out of her grip. It clattered to the floor.

By instinct—and a good one—she reached for the knife at her belt, but Solas caught her wrist and raised it above her head as she landed against the tiles of the mosaic. The colors swam, his focus entirely on her: complexion glistening from exertion; the tips of her ears, where they stuck out from her hair, rosy and tantalizing; the hurried puffs of her exhales drying the sweat at the base of his throat. He circled her other wrist with his fingers and pinned her to the wall with his hip. 

Going still under him, she said, “That’s against the rules.”

Perhaps so, but the piney scent of her clean hair and the visible flutter of a rapid pulse in her neck did nothing to discourage him. “Shall I release you?” he asked. If she wished him to, he would, unquestioningly; but he hoped with a wild avidity that she did not.

“No.”

A single word spoken in unwavering Elvhen: permission that broke what remained of Solas’s restraint. Covering her, he brought his mouth to the edge of her ear, dragging the ring at the center of the lower lip over it, baring his teeth. Those he used faintly before soothing the spot with his tongue.

Ellana gasped something in her language, short and gruff, and shifted in his grasp—not in protest. He took the opportunity to nudge her thighs with his knee until she parted them in scuffs of her bare feet. His own thigh, long and slender, slipped into the gap, meeting the heated apex. Pressed to her there, he lit a different spell than those they had sparred with. Ellana cried out under the pleasure, and Solas was certain there was no finer sound.

The leather of her bodice abraded his chest through the thin linen of his shirt. He wanted it gone, but the interruption would spoil her acquisitive squirms as she rubbed herself against his leg. With a flourish of magic, Solas murmured in her language, “More?”

“More,” came the breathless reply.

He could give her release like this—astride his thigh and hemmed in by his body. She was not small, but his breadth and strength were greater. He had been made for war beyond the spells he could wield, though he had not fought hand-to-hand, tearing flesh with bloodied teeth, in centuries.

You could be so much more than a scheming witch’s weapon.

Solas bit back a growl. Anaris had no place here; none of the plots of Arlathan did. With Ellana Lavellan clinging to him, taking the pleasure he had longed for weeks to give her, nothing mattered more than unlacing her bodice—cutting it off with her dagger, if he had to—and putting his hands every place she would permit him to touch.

But not against a wall.

“Hold onto me,” he said, at last relinquishing his hold on her wrists.

She obeyed, arms about his neck as he took her by the backside and bore her to the altar. Sitting down onto it, he put her where she belonged over his leg once more. One hand he planted on her hip; the other he brought to tug at the laces of her bodice.

It was no more arduous an undressing than the more elaborate garments in Arlathan, but the need to strip Ellana bare was so urgent Solas’s fingers trembled with it. Time did not stretch as interminably ahead as he was accustomed to; he had to have her—now.

Her shoulders dipped as he pushed the bodice over them, leaving her in a shirt too thin for the autumn, with no band to conceal her breasts. Solas cupped one, his thumb at the peak, and she curved her back, hair falling down it as she tossed her head. He lunged for her exposed throat, lips landing where he had rent others. The skin was agreeably salty when he licked up to her chin. She clutched blindly at his back, catching his hair in her fumbling. The sting at his scalp roused him further.

He brought a bespelled touch to her waist, pulling the shirt from her trousers in a single hard jerk. The muscles of her belly contracted as he traced her lean sides. “Lift your arms, Ellana.”

She complied, and he pulled the homespun over her head. It had not yet crumpled on the ground before he had settled his nose between her breasts, chin pillowed. Mouthing at the soft flesh, he followed the swell of one to set the ring in his lip under her nipple, his tongue circling there. She gave a whine of approbation that dragged into a proper moan as he suckled her. That, and her unyielding grip on his shoulders, went straight to his cock.

Ellana’s knee was not so far from the join of his legs, a danger and a delight both. She could give him friction in kind, easing his want, but if she writhed too much, she might strike him and put a very abrupt end to this bout. For that, he would endure without. And he had no intention of indulging himself; she would shout for Fen’Harel as she came for Solas.

Caught in that and in the musky flavor of her skin, he did not mark the progress of her fingers on his neck until pleasure shot along his spine, arcing from his tailbone under his testicles. He broke from her nipple, a thread of saliva snapping as he did, and filled the shrine with a groan. Ellana had turned the spell about on him, to blood-burning effect.

In his earliest encounters, when every sensation had been startlingly new, the wonder had rendered him unable to put his attention to more than a single point of focus. He had lain almost entirely still that very first time, quaking to discover that his body could be good for more than hard fights and inconvenient demands for food and for sleep. It had taken years worth of handling to learn to manage his mouth at the same time as his hands, let alone wield a spell while a lover laved his chest. He had expected much the same of Ellana, untried as she was, but he should not have underestimated her. She took to the magic he taught with impressive cleverness; it was no surprise her desire kept pace.

She slipped her fingers under the loose collar of his shirt, the spell all the more potent. His voice came raspy as he said, “You have been practicing.”

Ellana moved her hips steadily, her warm center at the midpoint of his thigh. “Thinking of you.”

Solas’s grip at her waist left indents as savage joy went through his veins. Had their efforts coincided, he wondered. Across the strange passage between her eluvian and his, had they lain down at the same moment and taken their pleasure with the other in their thoughts? Had she bitten down on her pillow when she reached her peak, as he had done his to keep Felassan from hearing the forcible litany of her name?

“Did you—” Ellana started, only to stop abruptly, uncertainty in the averting of her eyes. Keen as she was, the shyness of inexperience could not be shaken so soon.

Solas might have spared her further chagrin with distracting caresses or a sure pulse of magic, but if she had confessed, so would he. “I did. Every night for four weeks.”

The rolls of her hips stuttered. “Four?”

The difference in time was inconsequential now that they were together, and Solas stroked her sides to make the point. Ellana took it, planting her hands against his chest. Her spell tingled there, and down as her fingers ventured over his stomach. Sensation, and heated anticipation, built at the base of his cock. She needn’t attend to him; it was not the offering due, and yet…

Taking hold of his shirt, she asked, “May I?” in such formal Elvhen that it undid him. Any misgiving frayed and floated away on his sigh of “Yes.”

She pulled the shirt from his trousers as he had done hers and divested him of it. In the chill of the night air, the gold ring in his right nipple turned cold, eliciting a shiver. Ellana did not ask his permission to bring her fingertips there, and he was glad of it; had she not touched him straightaway, he might have implored her to, and he had suffered indignities enough for one day.

But matters of his pride were lost to the light play of her touch around the pierced nipple and over it. The gold warmed under her attentions, and Solas with it. Bracing his hands on the altar, he opened the pale plane of his chest for her perusal, core tight in discipline as much as display. He would not allow insistent lust to rush her, when she had had no man before him.

The reflexive admonition at pressing for his own wants came weaker than ever, and was cut down at the knees by Ellana’s caress over the freckles across his breastbone. She pushed aside the pieces of hair that had escaped the knot, bringing up gooseflesh. She looked to him, awed. Gods, it seemed, did not rise to a touch. And perhaps it was true; Solas could not know; he had never been surer he was flesh and blood.

“Your lips,” he said.

“Where?” asked Ellana.

Anywhere. He glanced at the taut point of his right nipple, ring winking in the firelight. “There.”

Hesitancy drew a crease through the sweep of her vallaslin. “As you did to me?”

“Did you like it?” said Solas, and at her nod added, “So do I.”

His assurance smoothed her brow and drew her gaze lower. The soft ends of her hair brushed over his navel as she bent her head to taste the appointed place. He hissed at the hot sweep of her tongue, and she made to withdraw, but he said in her language, brooking no protest, “More.”

She closed her lips over the nipple, shifting the ring as she suckled in tender exploration. Her thumb went to the other and brushed it in featherlight strokes. Solas broke into coarse pants, not quite gasping, but when she lit the spell between thumb and forefinger, pinching as she sucked the ring, a raw sound tore from his throat.

Ellana lifted her face, lips damp and shining. He saw the question in her expression—had she done well?—and brought his thumb to her chin, rubbing between the slight jut and her lower lip. “Very good,” he said. Whatever else might have followed faded as she tipped her chin to mouth at the pad of that thumb—not a kiss, but just as affecting. It was not his finger Solas imagined between her plush lips then.

As if she had gleaned the thought, she glanced down his front to where his cock stretched the laces of his trousers. Solas felt the thunder of his heart as her fingers trailed along his side to the waistband of his trousers, and lower. When she cupped him, her hand was aglow, and his shout of pleasure split the quiet night. Its echo recalled his promise to please her—taking nothing for himself—yet he was unable to keep his hand from joining hers to undo the laces.

Ellana ceded to him, returning her hands, magic tempered, to his flanks. When the laces were loose, she watched him dip into the parted sides of his trousers and draw himself out. It was a feat not to ease the strain of hard waiting with a stroke of his own hand, but he managed it so that she might appraise what he had to offer her.

He had been made well—a matter he had addressed to Mythal only once, for how indignantly she had rejoined that she had not forged him to suit her tastes. Those were varied, he had seen in the centuries that followed, and so he believed her. Still, she had shaped his body in long lines and complementary proportions. None had left his bed unsatisfied, but he looked for admiration in Ellana Lavellan’s unschooled interest.

Head curiously tilted, she ventured a timid touch to the base of him. The answering twitch, rather than spooking her, inspired another caress, this one bolder. Solas’s lower belly clenched as she moved upward, brushing the underside of him. A glistening drop broke when she grazed the slit, smearing slick over the delicate skin.

“How?” Ellana murmured.

Taking her hand, Solas replied, “Ar ma ghilana.” I will guide you. He curved their fingers around him, relief and torment both; he ached at knowing now what he had denied himself twice before. A tingling along her palm earned a low, “No magic.” At her flinch, he soothed, “You wield it very well, but for this I need only your touch.” 

He omitted the full truth for his remaining pride’s sake: that if she used it, he would not last. Regardless of experience, she pulled at his seams, the deepest sinews of his desire.

Guiding her to stroke him from root to tip and lingering there, he said, “Here is where I feel the most. Hold firmly, but too much can cause pain.” Ellana made a small sound of dismay, her grip loosening. Solas tightened it again, as he liked. “I told you you would not hurt me in our bout,” he said. “I trust you will not do so now. And”—a sterner jerk of his wrist for emphasis—“there are times I wish to be handled vigorously.”

Ellana glanced at the patch of mosaic where Solas had pinned her, her staff abandoned on the ground. “I think I do too,” she said.

Solas’s approving rumble inspired a hard press of her center to his thigh. In tandem, he stroked his cock with her hand. While neither used the pleasure spell, the ambient magic in the shrine resonated with their consonant sighs.

“If I release you,” Solas said, “can you keep that pace, that pressure?”

Ellana turned her eyes up to his, radiant with determination. “You’ll tell me if I don’t,” she said, as trusting as any pupil of her tutor.

He could, but he would not have to. To see such self-assuredness—as alluring as her battle fire—he was already rising. She could stroke him however she liked, and he would come for her.

Withdrawing his hand, he watched the tip of his cock in the clutch of her fist. She did not let his retreat interrupt her, and he murmured, “Just like that,” as he brushed the heavy fall of her hair behind her shoulders. Half-naked and creamy-skinned above him, she was no less divine than he—perhaps more so in this rite.

Solas bit down on the ring in his lip, a sharp click and welcome pinch of near-pain to keep his head as he watched Ellana work. And felt it—the slide of silken foreskin in her grasp, the throb that went through his cock as she squeezed with each stroke, the gratifying tightness under his testicles. Taking her breasts in his hands, he said her name.

With her left fingertips, she traced the line of gold studs pierced through his ear, each point sensitive. She spoke in her tongue again; the same single word as before but gentle, admiring. The next was Elvhen and so quiet Solas was not wholly certain he was meant to hear it: “You’re beautiful.”

As was she, but what left his throat was a wordless groan at her pull of his cock. His eyes threatened to drop closed, but in forcing them open he was rewarded with Ellana’s open-mouthed smile, earned by his reaction to her work. Upon their first meeting, Solas had inscribed his pride at pleasuring her in veilfire, but tonight it would be she who could crow over him.

“More,” he bade her.

“Ma nuvenin,” she said, and stroked ever-so-slightly faster, pacing her hips to match.

Solas longed to lean closer and taste the peaks of her breasts, but the trailing of her hand down his ear to his jaw, his neck, his shoulder kept him at bay. She looked him over in guileless study, her fascination intoxicating. Even in his fantasies, he had not imagined she would be held so rapt by his body—shaped from and by so much death—and it pushed him closer to release.

“Are you—” she started.

“Close,” he said. “Yes. It is good, Ellana. You are.” He cradled her breasts for needed purchase as her forefingers trailed over his collarbone. Need coiled under his pectoral, tightening the nipple. Ellana saw it and, indulging him, caught the ring with the very tip of her finger. As she tugged lightly, she said, “Garas, Fen’Harel.”

An offering demanded as he sat upon his own altar, whispered rather than barked, and Solas gave it: hot pulses over her fingers, a profane reverence in the surge of his climax.

The mess he made of her brought Ellana up short, her strokes stopping too soon. Solas, unfinished, put his hand around hers to work himself through the last. His cock gave a final throb under the slick of his spend, and he let out a tremulous breath.

Ellana had gone still, one hand lying flat on his chest and the other besmirched with what he had given her. It was the second she was fixed on, her lips parted and tongue just visible behind her bottom teeth. Solas should have gone directly for a cloth to wipe away the spend before it grew sticky and cold, but her expression—wonder, not disgust—kept him seated. She liked what she had brought him to, and that roused his magic, relit with his thumbs at her nipples.

She arched and cried out, her marked hand stumbling from his cock to his hip bone and gripping him there. The smear of spend and bite of sharp fingernails against his skin spurred his hand down her stomach, over the knotted leather of her belt, and between her legs. The trousers were no barrier for the spell, and Solas relished how fervently she ground herself into his palm.

He needn’t ask her, as she had done him, if she neared her peak; the pitch of her quick moans was a honeyed prelude. Wild and artless he had called her once, and she was—captivating as no lover in Arlathan had been.

Lover.

Ellana Lavellan was not that, but as Solas drew her naked chest against his, sweat and spend mingled between their stomachs, he allowed himself the privilege of the word.

Redoubling the spell had her riding his thigh in hard rocks and gasping at his shoulder, where she had tucked her head. Solas nuzzled her hair, catching strands on his damp lips. When he reached the tip of her ear, he nibbled it; her answering mewl stirred his cock, ready again in short order, if she wanted it.

And there was no doubt he wanted her: his lithe and eager offering twined around him.

When she broke, it was in forceful jerks, her fingers digging into the back of his ribs and mouth open against his neck. He felt the shape of what she spoke in her language: that same terse syllable repeated three times. She finished on a fourth and went lax in his embrace.

He stroked her side, content to let her recover at her own pace, but when he heard the dry click of her swallow asked, “Do you need water?”

“Yes,” she replied, albeit without making any motion to peel herself away.

Smiling against the side of her head, Solas slipped his left hand from between her legs and gathered her to him. She gave a peep of surprise when he rose, hefting her too. “Can you stand?” he said.

Another “yes,” and so he set her onto her feet, careful not to catch her belt on his cock where it hung half-hard over the disordered laces of his trousers. Ellana could not help, it seemed, her eyes from tracking to it, upper teeth sinking into her lower lip. Solas fought not to preen overtly, though he did take his time about tucking himself back in. The laces he left undone for now, trousers hanging low on his hips as he went to retrieve the water skin and his discarded shirt.

“Drink,” he said, proffering the water to Ellana, “but save some to wash.”

A rivulet slipped from the corner of her mouth as she drank before offering the skin to Solas. He took it in one hand, holding out the other. Ellana extended her besmirched one, and he splashed water over her fingers. A pointed look at her belly brought her to him so he could clean that place too. He handed her his shirt to dry herself, saying, “I have many others.” 

He rinsed his own stomach, accepting the shirt after. Ellana went to retrieve her own, and Solas was gratified to see, even after she tugged it on, the lines of her body through it, backlit as she was by the braziers of veilfire. His desire diminished, however, when she put locks of hair back from her brow, knuckles brushing the vallaslin. Questions set aside in her lesson, and after, arose more insistent.

“Ellana, the marks you wear, do all your people have them?”

“Everyone of age does,” she replied as she pushed the hem of the shirt haphazardly into her trousers.

“‘Of age?’” asked Solas.

“At seventeen or eighteen, when we pass into adulthood.” She peered at him, bemused. “There’s a ceremony. We choose the vallaslin of a Creator, to honor them. Well, not all of them.” A pause and then: “Fen’Harel has no vallaslin.”

“Nor would I want them,” he was quick to say. “I will never bind any of the People to me.”

Ellana’s arms dropped to her sides, the tail of her shirt still hanging loose. “‘Bind?’” Plaintive, but edged with suspicion, she said, “You asked if I was a slave the first night…because of the vallaslin?”

The notion wounded her, Solas could see, and he regretted it, but could not take back what he had said then or now. “They are worn in Elvhenan to honor a…god as well, but those marked do not choose them, their masters do.”

“But there are no histories of that,” said Ellana, emphatic. “I would know. The Keeper wouldn’t hide something like that from me or from Hathaan. The First has to know every story.” Lines of consternation were dug into her forehead. “We were slaves once, but to the shemlen in Tevinter, not other elves.”

“‘Quick children?’” said Solas. “What do you mean by that?”

The translation—humans—was no clearer to him. Ellana, reading his uncomprehension, made a sound of frustration. “How do I say it? They’re people who live here—not the People, not elvhen , but people of a…different blood?”

Solas remembered arcs of crimson across a hundred battlefields, the color the same despite the difference of their races. Why did they oppose each other, he had asked Mythal, if the same blood ran in them all? “In Elvhenan,” he said to Ellana, “there are only the People and the durgen’len.”

“The children of the Stone,” said Ellana. “We know them, too. And the Qunari, but I don’t know the word in the old tongue for them.” The veilfire flickered over her pondering frown. “In our histories, the shemlen and the Qunari arrived later. First, there were only the People and the dwarves. If you don’t know them, are they yet to come where you are? How could that be—” She pinched her eyes shut. “It doesn’t make sense! The histories speak of the elvhen empire in Thedas. There’s a forest called Arlathan. I’ve never seen it—it’s too far north—but everything you say…it’s not like the stories.”

Solas crossed the small distance between them to touch her shoulder, poor as it was for comfort. He said, “It is not uncommon for stories to change as they are carried far from their source. If the Arlathan Forest you know is a great distance from these Free Marches, the truth of things could be obscured. If you know many histories, you will understand that.”

“And we don’t have a library full of puddles of memories,” Ellana said, sorrowfully.

Solas tried and failed to choke back a huff at the idea of traipsing through memories pooled in the market streets after a hard rain. Ellana threw him a narrow-eyed look, and he said, “They are wells of memory, not puddles, and neither are they perfect recollections. They are passed through the lens of the beholder, which is never objective.” He followed the sweep of her neck to her jaw, fingertips light. “You will remember this moment in one way and I another. The wells reflect that.”

She tilted her head to chase his touch, upset dwindling, and Solas would have given much to wade into a pool of her memory of their meetings—to see clearer what she made of him. Not as her misapprehension of a god, but as a man whose company she might enjoy.

He set matters of shemlen and twisted histories aside to ask, “What did you say, when you came for me? Something in your tongue.”

Chagrin reddened her cheeks—such a lovely shade—and she spoke the word again, the translation on its heels: “Fen. The Common word for fen is ‘wolf.’”

A bitter clench of Solas’s stomach as he heard his epithet in Anaris’s voice, in Elgar’nan’s. “Is that what you call me? ‘Wolf?’”

“It’s shorter than Fen’Harel,” Ellana said. “And not so…”

“Dreadful?” he asked, wry. Ellana missed the small levity and nodded gravely. Solas said, “Sometimes the others call me Fen, but not out of convenience, or kindness.”

“In our stories,” said Ellana, “the gods aren’t always kind. Including you.”

“I would not claim to be that,” Solas said.

She looked him over, from bare feet and sagging trousers to shoulders tickled by disheveled hair, then toward where her staff lay on the ground. “You’re teaching me, when you didn’t have to. That’s kindness.”

Moving to draw back from her, he said, “Not when I exact a price.”

To his surprise, Ellana caught his wrist and held him near. By the widening of her eyes, the hasty move caught her by surprise as well. That she might have reached for him by unconscious desire— Solas nearly growled with renewed want. He took her by the waist with the arm she did not hold.

“Is kindness what you want from your gods?” he asked. “Benevolence? Is that what you want from me?”

“I want—” she said, grip tight on his wrist yet not bringing his palm to her cheek. “I want…whatever you’ll give me, Wolf.”

Had she called him Fen’Harel that might well have been his name—the true one—but with it came a great deal more truth: about Arlathan, about the mages she called gods, about what he had done in wartime. ‘Wolf’ was not bound up in all Solas’s violence and intrigue, and if he wore that mantle in the shrine, he might slip those bonds when he was with her.

She allowed him to shift his hand to brush the vallaslin at her chin. “You chose to honor Ghilan’nain when you came of age. Why?”

“She’s the guide,” Ellana replied, as though that offered an explanation Solas was meant to grasp. The woman he knew had no concern for such things; her compass led only to Andruil.

“Were you lost?” he asked.

Ellana met his eyes, in hers arresting surety. “Not anymore.”

Cool wind blew over Solas’s nape, a shiver holding back his urge to pull her to him for the kiss he had wanted. It was a night of indulgences, but the growing chill marked the late hour. “You must get back to your clan,” he said to Ellana, “to rest before your match tomorrow. And it is perilous to traverse a forest alone in the darkness.”

“Not this one,” she said. “I know it by heart, and I have a few spells I can use in a scrape.” She raised her eyebrows. “I can think on my feet.”

Her playful turn tempted Solas sorely to keep her, perhaps until sunrise, when her path would be lit. He had countless ideas of what they might do to pass the time.

But so much more would go by in Arlathan, and he had yet to speak to Mythal. His respite in the shrine with Ellana was coming to its inevitable end.

“So you can,” he said of her quick thinking, “but I must return to my people as well.”

Sobering, she said, “Of course.”

“But I will come again tomorrow,” Solas insisted. “Your tomorrow. So that I might hear of your victory over Hathaan.”

Ellana offered a half-smile. “After tonight, I actually feel like I could win.”

“You have never won before?”

Mournfully, she shook her head.

Taking her cheek in his hand again, Solas admired the roundness of it—her health and vitality. “In this match,” he said, “you will.”

“Do I have your blessing, then?” she asked.

He had given it to her once, but he had been in the throes of the Fen’Harel charade then; now, he did not wish to lean into the role. “You do not need it,” he said. “You are ready.” Giving her cheekbone one more caress, he withdrew and went to collect his dagger. He slung the harness over his shoulder before hurriedly doing up the laces of his trousers. The shirt he left untucked in hopes the eluvian would deliver him to his residence and not back to Elgar’nan’s.

“Will it be four weeks again between tonight and tomorrow?” Ellana asked as he approached the mirror.

“I cannot guess,” Solas replied. Nor would he have as much opportunity to count the days as he had, not with his ‘friends’ picking fights amongst themselves that could devastate the empire. To Ellana: “Do not let it trouble you. Put your mind on your match. I can bear the wait.”

She was pensive, unspeaking, for a moment before she inclined her head in farewell. “Dareth shiral,” she said. “Wolf.”

The beast in him bayed and howled to go to her and seal the parting with that longed-for kiss, but he curbed it and said, “Until we meet again.”

The eluvian woke with a gesture, and he passed through it toward Arlathan and whatever trials awaited him beyond the haven of Ellana Lavellan.

Chapter Text

A damp-scented breeze stirred the canopy of leaves at the treeline, fat drops of rainwater popping against the hood of Ellana’s doeskin capelet and hissing as they struck the sphere of nascent spellwork cradled in her upturned hands. The magic wasn’t heated, but radiating power—each layer woven into a teeming whole, ready to be unleashed. She kept it contained, steadying the energies with a subtle but constant stream of Fade magic: a meditative draw and release through the steadfast Veil.

The work was a welcome respite from a storm-lashed morning spent pretending the air in the Keeper’s aravel wasn’t fogged with anticipation. Deshanna had, as Hathaan had predicted, given leave for her apprentices to hold a sparring match, but it would be fought away from the clan’s encampment and in the hour between late afternoon and dusk, when preparations began for supper and errant observers would be occupied.

While not hidden away in cloistered Circles, as much a shame as a hazard, magic was not so trusted among the Dalish that they were keen to see it wielded at force. Minor enchantments, the healing of wounds and calming of fevers; they were sourced from a benign Fade, where all dreamers walked in sleep. But jagged spears of lightning and lashed spells mighty enough to part flesh too closely resembled nighttime terrors: unearthly and threatening; a dangerous reminder of the demons clamoring for purchase in a mage’s mind.

Keepers were trusted in no small part because the fiercest of their abilities stayed concealed until they were called upon to defend the clan.

For Ellana, waiting for the appointed time meant going about her chores in waves of fidgety industry and then lulls of distraction, her focus wandering from grinding herbs and cleaning flasks to mosaic tiles glinting with the luster of conjured flame. She had nearly dropped a clay mixing bowl when Hathaan had proffered a vial of sticky dragonthorn reduction and said, “More?” In it she’d heard Fen’Harel’s asking of the same, his lips against her ear and lean thigh between hers.

“No,” she’d replied. “I have enough.”

Of the reduction, certainly, but not of what had she’d had upon the altar in the night: Fen’Harel peeling her sweat-damp shirt away to ply her breasts with magic and mouth; her fingers splayed on his smooth, pale chest and around his cock as he anointed them, pearly and heated. Though unchanged and lightly chapped from the astringent potion she’d made, that hand felt marked—charged with readiness to cast the spells he’d taught, and greedy for the silken skin-over-steel of his arousal against her palm.

She’d all but run from the closed-in aravel when Deshanna had released her, going north toward the forest’s edge while Hathaan had veered east toward the heath. Ellana expected he was making private preparations for the match, as she was, seated on a dry patch of ground at the base of an ancient oak, bracketed by the vee of its roots.

With a subtle beckoning of the Fade, she added to the spell, the emerald strand absorbed by a more fitful mass, white at the edges. Fen’Harel claimed all magic in Arlathan was colorless, and while the Veil undeniably tinted hers, the same milk-pale corona had shone as they’d stood in the shrine, spells built together pulsing with their tandem breaths. He had set the rhythm then, regular and steadying; unlike the ragged heaves upon his arrival through the eluvian.

Ellana had seen panic before, when a pretty clan girl had come stumbling back into camp after a run-in with a pack of shemlen men on the road. They hadn’t hurt her in the way any lone woman feared, but from her torn shirt and tangled hair, it had been a near thing. The Keeper, hearing her frantic gasps, had brought her cool water and encouraged her to sit on a bed of moss—all without a touch.

“The fear and the fury of an attack are blinding,” Deshanna had told Ellana after the girl had been put to bed with dram from a bottle in the locked store. “Had I tried to embrace her, she might have felt herself back with the shems and lashed out. It’s best to sit by and let the frenzy pass, as long as she knew she was safe with me nearby.”

Fen’Harel, when he’d pitched out of the mirror, had been no less shaky and winded than the clan girl, his face reddened as he scrabbled at the clasp of his cloak. Ellana’s invocation of his name had brought his hanging head up enough for her to see the dark disorientation in his eyes.

Heeding the Keeper’s wisdom, she’d gone for the water skin, saying no more than what it was and keeping an arm's length distance between them. If Deshanna had feared a skinny Dalish girl’s panicked thrashing, Ellana dared not risk whatever the Dread Wolf could turn on her. Only when he had slaked his thirst, the half-wild gleam of violet in his gaze dimmed to blue-gray, did she brave more: offering a place to sit on his shucked cloak and joining him there.

Her hasty pulse had been a demand to know how, why, what happened, but when the water skin had been laid aside after a second deep drink, he’d asked after the day—her tomorrow—with nothing said of what had brought him nearly to his knees. She wasn’t owed an explanation, for his affairs were his own, and regardless, she hadn’t had much time to stew in the disappointment of it. She had set out to the shrine after supper to seek a lesson in magic that could win her bout against Hathaan, and she had gotten it—with much more, too.

The spell she held surged alongside remembered fervor: chasing Fen’Harel about the chamber as he baited her to attack him; the thrill of success that came with each lesson; his cutting edge smiles as he toyed with her—not maliciously; his advance when she’d struck his barrier.

Maybe she should have been frightened as he’d deftly disarmed her, his greater size and immeasurable power on display, but when he had pinned her to the wall, she’d wanted nothing more than to submit to him and make the due offering.

Shall I release you?

No, she had wanted him closer, his felandaris scent all around and his body covering hers. When he had dived for her sensitive ear, she’d spoken in Common without thought or hesitancy: Wolf, an entreaty not to a Creator, but to a man. The one he had implied she hid from Hathaan, as if sneaking away from camp to meet a lover was the trespass, not consorting with the Betrayer.

But the dreadfulness of the legend had been lost then, as it had each night before, to his skillful touch and tongue against her skin, hot and slick and driving her mad. Though not entirely mindless. When he’d borne her to the altar and sat her astride his thigh, she had brushed the tender back of his neck, feeling the knobs of his spine, and turned the magic he’d taught on him. His judder and groan under it had shot satisfaction through her, and hunger to see what his fine clothes hid.

She had no right to it—a god’s form—but he had responded to her touch in ways she couldn’t have spun in her fantasies: gooseflesh and shivering breaths, masculine sounds of pleasure that she felt in his chest and sent shockwaves of desire to her center. No fumbling with clan boys could have matched Fen’Harel’s lean throat as he tossed his head back when she sucked his nipple, the golden ring clacking against the back of her teeth.

She hadn’t expected him to permit her more, but when she had boldly put her hand between his legs, he had quickly and blindly gone to unlace his trousers, like it was a matter of need.

She had never touched a man’s cock before, something he knew, or could tell by her cautious exploration. Yet, with the same sure but undemanding intention he taught her magic, he took her hand and wrapped it around himself.

Ar ma ghilana.

And he had: guiding her to pleasure him. She had followed his lead, then the wordless cues his body gave her, until he was at the edge of breaking.

Garas, Fen’Harel.

Raised by the Keeper, a healer, Ellana had known what to expect with his climax, but a lecture was a far cry from the arresting sensuality of him spilling at her command. She had stopped, spellbound by the heat and slippery texture of his spend, but rued her inexperience when he had to grasp her hand and stroke himself twice more to finish. That final pulse held her rapt, the mess of him over her fingers base yet beautiful.

She could’ve stared, fascinated, until the spend went cold, but he didn’t afford her the opportunity. His spell at her breasts overwhelmed her, and she rocked herself against the hand he put between her thighs. She broke in waves in Fen’Harel’s embrace, crying out for him loud enough pierce the night beyond the shrine. And there was no shame, no fear; she gave herself to him with the abandon every story warned of.

“Ellana.”

She started, coalescing the spell into an angry ball as she turned to the figure coming from the woods at her back.

A graceful recurve bow of ironbark was slung across his back, the requisite quiver of arrows beside it. Two sheathed knives hung at his hipbones. A third larger one was strapped to the side of his calf. His hair, thick and wiry straw blond, had been combed back from his brow, marked with Andruil’s vallaslin. The scar from a wyvern’s claw cut from the right corner of his mouth to his temple.

“Glynnin,” said Ellana, “I didn’t hear you there.” Nor would she have, considering how silently a true hunter could move; and he was that—the best in Clan Lavellan.

Last she’d seen him, it had been to return the ashwood bow she’d broken in her fall into the shrine. Shame accompanied that memory, and the magic she’d carefully fed for an hour guttered and went out. 

“Whispers of your spellwork have grown louder, lethallan,” Glynnin said, surveying her where she knelt in the dirt. “Narine’s pendant, the carpenter’s hand. What would that gnarl of fire have done to me?”

“It’s not fire,” Ellana replied. “Not exactly. But it still would’ve burned.”

“Then I will announce myself better when next I seek you out.”

Brow knit and hands open, Ellana said, “I’m not so clumsy that I would hurt you.” Precision in casting was one thing Fen’Harel hadn’t needed to push her to hone.

“I didn’t say you were. It was meant as praise for your skill.” Glynnin’s scar tugged at the suntanned skin over a stout cheekbone as his expression shifted toward a frown. “You aren’t paid many compliments—unused to taking them.”

She couldn’t deny it, and let her silence be confirmation.

“Then I’m the clumsy one,” Glynnin said. “I should have been plainer.” The amber of turning autumn leaves matched lighter flecks in his brown eyes—steady, if not soft. “I saw you here with your spell and said nothing, so I could watch its light play on your face. It was striking. But you have always been that.”

Ellana’s mouth dropped open, inelegant in surprise. Circumspect, with a temper as steady as his bow arm, Glynnin had given no indication he thought any differently of her than did the rest of the clan: acknowledging her with measured respect as an apprentice to the Keeper, but otherwise uninterested in her meager talents for crafting, hunting, and magery.

But he had been kind when she’d slunk up to him four nights ago: A bow can be remade, he’d said. You cannot.

After what had transpired with Fen’Harel that night, she hadn’t given more consideration to his gentle favor, but with him standing near and paying her compliments none other in the clan had done, she saw him anew.

Build compact but strong, he wore leathers like a second skin. His complexion was toughened from long days outside, the lines at the corners of his eyes deeper than most men only a handful of years past thirty. The wyvern scar, though puckered, didn’t spoil a face that was, by Lavellan standards, handsome. And his skill as a hunter made him an attractive prospect. 

Any woman in the clan would have been flattered by his attention, and Ellana was no exception. Coy pleasure simmered at being noticed—having been noticed all along, it seemed.

“Ma serannas, lethallin,” she said.

Other words she’d spoken in the ancient tongue pealed bell-like in her mind, though they had been whispered to Fen’Harel as she’d brushed the bits of gold in his long ear: You’re beautiful. So he was, with honey-colored hair falling down his naked back and creamy, unblemished skin. Without his lavish clothes, he shone, rarified and glorious. The only similarity between him and Glynnin was their self-assured bearing.

“If I’ve disturbed your practice,” Glynnin said, recalling her to the forest, “I can go. Or maybe would you walk with me back to camp?”

The sun was obscured by clouds that threatened another downpour, the afternoon wearing on. In the distance, Ellana could make out the spindly columns of smoke from freshly lit cookfires. It wouldn’t be long before she was due to meet Hathaan for the match.

Putting back her hood, she rose and retrieved her staff from where she’d propped it against the oak tree. Glynnin stood a hairsbreadth shorter than her—not overlarge for a Dalish man, and smaller than Fen’Harel. For all that he was called wolf, he wasn’t built slight enough to be a hunter.

“I’m not going back to camp,” she said to Glynnin, “but I’ll go with you in that direction.”

Offering a close-lipped smile, he turned south. Ellana came to his side, the fluffy tails of the brace of fennecs he carried grazing her ankle. For the first ten paces, they said nothing, until Ellana asked, “What became of the bow?”

“Kindling,” Glynnin replied, and preempted her wince: “Don’t mourn it. I’ve done worse to better weapons. I fell down a ravine once, at sixteen, fool enough to think the shale of a cliffside wouldn’t give. Snapped my bow in half and caught the sharp end in my side. The ribs stopped the worst of it, but there’s a scar. And not even June himself could have salvaged what was left of that bow.”

Ellana’s mind’s eye conjured Fen’Harel’s long-fingered hand extended as he offered to take the ashwood she’d ruined to the god of weaponcraft. It had been unfathomable then to put such a simple thing to June. Now, however, a pinprick of regret niggled at her own ribs for not availing herself of another god’s boon to return the bow to Glynnin whole. 

“I haven’t burned it yet,” he told her, “but I could tonight, to roast a fennec. Or two, if you’ve a mind to have some.” He faced ahead, sloped nose and sturdy jaw set against the gray skies. “I know the Keeper likes to have you at table, and you know I don’t take meals there.” He gave a sigh to fill the space where the rest should have gone: not since he’d been widowed, mother and child both lost on the same night. “But I make flatbread on heated stones to wrap the meat. It’s better than you might think.”

Ellana’s stride faltered, astonishment making her ungainly, and Glynnin slowed to accommodate it. “You want me to have supper with you?” she asked.

“I’d like it,” he replied, “if you would.”

The plane of damp grass in front of her gave way to a vision of red-orange flame lighting his face as he turned fennecs on a spit. The scar would stand out in the flickering glow, but it wasn’t as fearsome as she’d once thought, and her middle had fluttered at the earnest, if muted, smile he’d worn when she’d agreed to walk with him. That sweet excitement, though, was nothing like the weighty drop of her stomach when another man bared his teeth.

In her vision, the shade of the flames turned cooler, to the green of veilfire, and they lit more angular features: a tapering jaw; a pointed, dimpled chin; and cheeks sensuously pinked as he panted under her caresses.

She’d intended to go to Fen’Harel after the sparring match, win or lose, and supper with Glynnin would keep her away. If a single day was weeks on the other side of the eluvian, and he waited for her summons…

“I can’t tonight,” she said to Glynnin. “But”—the question came with remarkable ease—“on another?”

“Name it early in the day, if you can,” he said, “so I can hunt the fennec.”

It didn’t have to be that they ate, but few went out of their way for her, and Ellana rather liked that he would. “I’ll do that.”

As they neared the encampment, she spotted a dark-haired figure at its boundary. Hathaan carried his staff, ironbark crowned with a polished orb of crystal.

“You’re expected,” said Glynnin. “I’ll take my leave here, then. Thank you for your company, Ellana.”

She had time for only a brief “And yours” before he strode away as silently as he’d come.

“Did you go out hunting?” Hathaan asked when Ellana had made her way to where he stood.

“Is that a serious question?” she replied, planting the butt of her staff on the rain-soaked ground.

Hathaan, no master archer or trapper himself, gave a huff of amusement. “No, but walking with Glynnin? What was he about?”

“Chance meeting,” said Ellana. The truth, if unembellished. 

Let the curious murmurs of why the clan’s finest hunter would pay mind to its least remarkable mage keep—even if she wondered it herself. After all, if she didn’t win the contest for First, she would be sent away and his time wasted.

What lightness remained in her belly grew heavy with embarrassment, a far more familiar feeling.

Hathaan’s hum was barely an acknowledgment, his head already turned in the direction of the meadow where their match would be held.

Ellana let suppers and rumors fall by the wayside. “We’d best go,” she said.

Deshanna awaited them, her hold on a staff making for three armed mages. Rising wind couldn’t blow off an uneasy expectancy among them, charged like pre-storm atmosphere. But the nervy rising of hairs at the back of Ellana’s neck came paired with an unaccustomed thrill: the recollection of stroking those at Fen’Harel’s nape as she lit her fingertips with sensual spellwork. Both Hathaan and Deshanna peered at her as sparks sprang unbidden from her left hand.

“You will restrain yourselves until I call the start of the bout.” Though the Keeper spoke to both her apprentices, the bladed reproof was for Ellana. She curled her hand into a fist to school the magics and gave a cut nod. The Keeper went on, “The rules are known to you. Attack only as necessary and defend well. A strike to the barrier is one point. Five will decide the match. Are we agreed?”

Hathaan and Ellana chorused a dutiful, “Yes, hahren.”

“Very well. Take your places.”

The space of meadow between them yawned twice as large as the confines of the shrine, too vast a distance for anything less than potent spells to cross. A day ago, Ellana might’ve feared hers too feeble, but the specter of a broad hand pressed against her breastbone, a teasing finger between the laces of her shirt. It is not for want of power that you struggled. There is a great well of it in you. Trust it, and do not hold back.

Knuckles white as she gripped her staff, Ellana sensed beyond the shivering Veil the Fade energies Fen’Harel trusted she could wield.

“Remember,” said the Keeper, “you fight for the good of our people. Do so with honor.” With arms raised toward gathering thunderheads, she bade them start with a cry of “Enasalin!” Victory.

Hathaan’s barrier shimmered to life with a drumbeat thrum of power. By the wintry halo at his right hand, he expected to counter an opening volley of flame. And he was right to, knowing Ellana’s tidy order of spells; the crutch of them one after another, then circling back to start again. But what she drew from the Fade and cast met his spell in a crystalline explosion: ice upon ice.

It bought him up short, his legs parked wide and staff pointing tip-down at the grass. Ellana spun her own, the crystal burning bright enough to leave a comet’s trail of red glow in front of her face. The flourish served its purpose—distraction—and afforded her time to shape a new spell before Hathaan had started his own. Quick reflexes spared him a strike on his barrier as he darted to the left and dropped to one knee. Turning a bewildered gaze up, he looked on Ellana as a stranger.

The skies rumbled, lightning edging the clouds with silver. Hathaan rose with singularly elvhen grace, energy crackling around the crystal in his staff as if he’d pulled it from the heavens. Ellana saw the attack before it came, his features contorted with effort. Fen’Harel had given her no such time make ready; his spells had flown from his hands without a hint of his intention, forcing her to react faster than she had in all her training under Deshanna. It was no challenge to sweep an arc of flame to intercept the bolts of Hathaan’s spell.

From the torrent, she drew back a handful of fire and, weaving into it strands of power pulled from the Fade, cast it toward him. He countered by inches, but not the second volley, quickly assembled, which struck his barrier in a hail of sparks.

“Point to Ellana,” called the Keeper.

Drops of frigid rain struck Ellana’s brow and chin as she formed a barrage of energy the dark purple of a bruise, restive and limned in stark white. Hathaan intercepted it with a shield of ice, which burst apart as he attacked through it—lightning again.

Ellana charged ahead, hair curling wildly in the lingering static. Hathaan retreated, three icicle spears awkwardly lobbed in her direction. She ducked away from two and melted the third mid-flight with a fireball—an unneeded, threatening display. Forming a spire of her own, she sent it for Hathaan, and though he tried to counter, it made a spray of tiny fragments as it burst upon his barrier.

“A second point to Ellana.”

She braced for the riposte, but it didn’t arrive. Hathaan slipped on the wet grass and, cursing, used his staff to help him find his footing. Ellana could’ve struck her third point in the interval, but in matches past, he’d held back when she had stumbled. As much as she wanted to win, she owed him the leeway he’d given her—at least this once.

Thunder cracked, briefly deafening, and Hathaan used its cover to throw three knots of angry spellwork in her direction. They flew fast and dangerous, forcing Ellana to the ground, flat on her front. The volley hissed against her barrier.

“Point to Hathaan.”

She scrambled up, toes sliding and hands pruned from the hard-falling rain. A biting westerly wind drove it against her back and side until she was soaked to the skin. Hathaan’s black hair lay against his skull, lank tendrils stuck upon Mythal’s vallaslin. The branchlike tattooing bunched with anger and consternation by turns, both aimed at Ellana, for he had never in his nineteen years been on the back foot in a practice bout.

Weight in the balls of her own feet, she extended her left hand to open a fissure in the Veil, the curtain appearing as a green glimmer at the periphery of her vision. From it, she pulled a curl of magic, writhing in its hunger for freedom in a world beyond the Fade. Ellana felt in it the frightful damage it could do unchecked; but in her hands, by her will, it was malleable. Layer upon layer, she transmuted it for her purpose: a lance of power that could, as Fen’Harel had said, tear barriers like wet paper.

Yet, its building didn't come as easily as her previous spells, and Hathaan managed another volley as she worked. Rather than release the magic half-formed, she let his starburst of ice land hard against her barrier.

Deshanna called, “A second point to Hathaan,” but his shout came louder: “Don’t count that, harhen! She stood by and took it.” Rainwater streamed down his cheeks like furious tears as he snarled, “I won’t have you let me strike, Ellana! Fight back properly or don’t fight at all.”

The rain didn’t reach her spell, burning off above the white-hot mass. She cried, “I have been, at last!”

He leveled her with scorching ire. “If you’ve held this back all along—” A ferocious clap of thunder drowned out the rest, lightning lancing across the sky to blanch his tea-colored complexion.

Ellana called, “Did you not tell me that I could try harder than I do?” It had been only three days before, in the field with the halla, where he’d found her in company with the watchful wolf’s image. “Is this not hard enough?”

Her chest strained with ragged breaths as she drove the final energies into the spell. The crystal in her staff blazed, but she cast its focus aside to steer the magic from her open palms.

The force of the spells must come from you.

And it did, a brilliant spear of magic soaring across the meadow to pierce Hathaan’s barrier through and send him sprawling onto his back.

“Stop!” Deshanna exclaimed, throwing her slight form between Ellana and Hathaan, him lying supine and motionless. The feverish rush of the fight iced over, fear as cold as the rain sliding down Ellana’s back. She made to approach, but Deshanna gestured to keep her distance. Ellana obeyed without question, watching the Keeper kneel at Hathaan’s side.

Hands under his skull and at his brow, Deshanna lifted his head. He was conscious, Ellana saw, but his eyes were unfocused, glassy with pain, and two runnels of bright red blood trailed from his nose over his lips and chin.

“Hathaan, Ir abelas!” she cried, defying the Keeper to go him. “I didn’t mean to—”

His head lolled slightly as he turned it toward her, and she started to beg forgiveness again, but what he said landed as hard as his fist to her cheek: “Get away from me, era’harel.” The name given to the arcane demons that, in stories, ravaged villages with evil magics: a dread mage.

“Hush,” said Deshanna, stroking his sodden hair. “Rest.” To Ellana: “Go. I will see to him.”

Go where?

She couldn’t return to camp, when it would be refuge for the wounded Hathaan, or seek solace among the halla, who would sense her distress and grow anxious themselves. The weather raged too cruelly for her to shelter among the trees, and she couldn’t stay out in the rain.

With a last heartsick look at Hathaan, Ellana stood. She turned from him and from her mentor, abandoned her staff with chilly resignation, and ran to find sanctuary in the Dread Wolf.

Chapter Text

Ancient trunks and late autumn foliage yet clinging to vaulted branches muffled the worst of the storm, but leaves and soil stuck to Ellana’s bare feet as she loped through the forest’s sodden undergrowth. The veilfire cupped in her hand lit the path—runes no longer needed to guide her—to the stand of evergreens guarding Fen’Harel’s shrine.

Hathaan’s aspersion had dogged her heels as she’d fled the meadow, thrown with a malice he’d never shown and thick with the pain she’d caused. The blood from his nose had flowed freely, the rain washing it down his face to ruin his white shirt: crimson spatter as much a stain on Ellana.

Her toes sank into the crumbly, wet dirt at the lip of the sinkhole, the pit black and ominous. With no rope to climb down, she hesitated, misgiving twining through her gut like the severed roots that sagged toward the interior of the shrine. In countless stories—in all the stories—Fen’Harel lied and betrayed the gods to his own ends; those rarely apparent and laid at the feet of his devious nature, inborn and unrenounceable. He was not to be trusted, for any boon could just as well be a bane.

Could his lessons in magic have tricked her into doing harm? Was he simply amusing himself with her supposed instruction—with her body?

A flash of lightning silvered the boughs of the evergreens, an iron-gray sky spewing another deluge of frigid rain. Regardless of the Dread Wolf’s motives, the shrine offered a dry refuge and braziers Ellana could light for warmth.

With numb hands, she sought a root as thick as her forearm and as long as her leg, testing its strength briefly before using it to clamber into the sinkhole. It was too short to bring her to the flagstones, so she took a deep, preparatory breath before letting go. Landing in a half-crouch did little to ameliorate the pins and needles discomfort of impact. 

In stiff paces, she moved toward the wolf statue above the altar. The murky forest light never quite reached the nearby eluvian, concealing it in penumbra until she lit veilfire in one brazier and then the other. She extended her waterlogged hands toward the heat of the flames, avoiding too close a look at the disheveled figure in the mirror—afraid she might find the empty eyes and rending talons of an arcane horror: era’harel.

Wrought from the corpses of fallen mages by demons of pride, Ellana had only heard tales of them meant to frighten children—or bully them, if those children had an affinity for magic themselves. Ellana had borne the brunt of that between her and Hathaan, as the eldest and on account of her meager talents. An inadequate mage made an easy target for possession, and an even easier one for childish cruelties.

The worst had been a gaggle of boys around her age—then twelve—who had collected all the bits of ruined fabric from around camp for six weeks and made them into a stinking patchwork costume with bonelike branches for arms and a mask of jagged tree bark teeth. They’d cornered Ellana coming back from tending the halla, when the Keeper was across camp, and cast her as the pride demon in their mummers’ play, demanding she puppet the era’harel like in the stories.

Ellana, keeping her promise to Deshanna never to turn magic on their own people, had had to fight them off with slaps, kicks, and her full vocabulary of curses in Elvhen. When they had finally given up, her arms had been covered in red weals from lashes of the dread mage’s branch hands.

Hathaan had been the one to catch her limping back to her shared aravel to wash and find something else to wear, and while she’d tried to keep the story from him, for fear he’d get the same treatment, he had needled it out of her. Puffing his skinny chest up when she’d finished her telling, he’d said, “There’s nothing dreadful about you, Lana,” and promised to return with an elfroot salve for her skin; but he hadn’t come back before Ellana had lain down to rest—to hide.

A ruckus had woken her some time later, the hunters hurrying with buckets of water to put out the fire that had started in a hollow tree not far from camp. It turned out the bullies’ treasure trove had been kept in it, their costume included, and it had ignited under mysterious circumstances. Ellana had cried into her pillow that night: gratitude for a slip of a mage who had found a way to use his magic to guard them both, when she could not.

For Hathaan to turn the name of era’harel on her stung more fiercely than the lashes she’d taken that day.

But did she not deserve it, for having taunted and then bloodied him with the spells taught by Fen’Harel?

Knees wobbly as the last of her battle nerves faded, Ellana sat upon the altar, her tangled hair dripping onto her thighs. Bracketed by the wolf’s paws, she should not have found solace—a treacherous kind that threaded through her trembling limbs, even as she knew how all her people’s wisdom warned of the Dread Wolf.

But the man who had stumbled through the eluvian yesterday, no less shaky than Ellana was now, didn’t resemble a fearsome deceiver. There had been no pretense when he’d spilled into her grasp, or after, when he’d gently offered her water before he took any himself. And while the magic he’d shown her was potent, he had not been the one to strike Hathaan with it; she had done that herself, in a rush of pride that suited a demon-raised era’harel.

Not every misdeed could be put upon Fen’Harel, and running to him here had been just as much her choice.

The blade of the ritual knife flashed as Ellana drew it from her belt to bite into her palm. She pressed the cut hand flat to the altar, feeling no magic between the stone and her skin, but the Veil’s presence slithered over her back, palpable through her sodden clothes. It rippled around the eluvian’s glowing surface, making way for the man passing through. Ellana stood, casting a hasty healing spell over her hand. It was whole again before Fen’Harel had both feet in the room.

Absent was the ornamental dagger strapped across his chest, and his garments were layered for winter, his hair collected in two ties over his right shoulder. It took only a brief glance about the shrine for him to recognize it, and Ellana’s stomach went light when his mouth, so prone to sternness, softened to the beginnings of a smile. But it fell away when blue-gray eyes settled on her.

His advance and grim declaration of “You are soaked to the bone” preempted any greeting.

“There’s a storm,” she said, as if the clamor of it above them wasn’t plain enough.

“And you thought it wise to go through it without so much as a hood?” he rejoined, tipped with disapproval as he surveyed the capelet she’d forgotten in the midst of the sparring match. The leather was so wet it wouldn’t have been much use, anyway. Fen’Harel put his hand to her jaw, a shocking heat against her chilly skin. “Take off your clothes,” he said.

In the many versions of this meeting Ellana had considered over the course of the day, she hadn’t anticipated he’d order that so promptly, or that when she didn’t go to undo the frogs of her capelet straightaway, he would put the knots through the cord loops with brusque efficiency. But there was no sensuality about the slap of leather on stone as he pushed the capelet off her shoulders, no want in the subsequent assessment of her clothing and the way he set about removing it.

Ellana, struck by his practical urgency, let him unlace her corseted belt, tooled with leaping halla, and tug her long-sleeved tunic away, leaving her in only confining trousers. Fen’Harel barely looked at the places on her bare breast he’d paid great attention to in the night, instead rubbing his warm hands over her arms in quick strokes.

When he stopped it was to bring his fingers to the wooden buttons of her trousers, putting them through the holes in deft flicks. He said, curt, “Will you make me pull them down for you?”

Chastented, Ellana hooked her thumbs in the waistband and lowered the trousers by resistant inches. Her undergarments were just as soaked and cold, and a flinty look from Fen’Harel had her removing them as well. Naked, she shifted closer to the braziers, peering into their leaping flames.

She didn’t see so much as hear the shush of fabric, then Fen’Harel’s summons: “Ellana, come.” She turned to find him seated on the remnants of the cloak he’d left, wear-worn as if by years. He’d stayed dressed below the waist, but had shucked his shirt and held his quilted jacket, elaborately embroidered, out in invitation.

Ellana went in silent steps to sit between his parted legs, as she had the first night, her back to his chest. He draped the jacket over her front and slipped his arms beneath it to settle at her waist. He made a small sound of approval when she tucked her chilled toes against his calves.

“This is the second time you have come to this place half-drowned,” he said. “If it rains so often in the Free Marches, do you not have oilskin or fur to wear?”

“We do,” Ellana replied, “but the storm came on during the bout, and after I—” Squeezing her eyes shut brought the luminous spire of spellwork she’d cast to the fore of her memory, then red blood on tea-tinted skin. “I hurt him, so I ran.”

“Who?” asked Fen’Harel.

“Hathaan. My spell— I struck him down. Bloodied his nose.”

The scene played out again in her mind’s eye, this time accompanied by his shout of distress as the air was knocked from his lungs by the impact of her spell against his barrier, rending it. Yet, Fen’Harel’s voice, as gentle as his thumb finding the furrow between her breasts, cut through the anguish of that sound: “You won the match.”

“Nobody won,” said Ellana tightly. “It’s not supposed to be a real fight. He wasn’t meant to get hurt. But he shouldn’t have—” She broke off before throwing an indictment she would regret.

Fen’Harel’s soft exhale floated over her ear, his left hand rubbing her lower belly. “Tell me what happened, Ellana. From the beginning.”

She had, in the restive hours of morning chores, imagined how she might recount for him her victory in the match, shaping the Elvhen words with her tongue but not speaking them, so Deshanna and Hathaan wouldn’t overhear. But those lines tasted ashy now, the planning of them foolish, and she fumbled the liquid syllables as she tried to do as he asked. Shame only compounded with the blundering effort, and she fixed her gaze on the mud her feet had smeared on Fen’Harel’s clean trousers.

“Ir a-abelas,” she stammered, curling her toes away.

“Atish’an.” His lips brushed the fine hairs at her temple as he said it again—peace—and his long fingers at the arch of her low ribs held her firmly against him.

Like his heat was loosening her cold-stiffened joints, his subtle caress unclenched her jaw, and she was able to begin the story with meeting Hathaan at the outskirts of the clan’s encampment.

When she finished, Fen’Harel hadn’t moved, his chin near her cheekbone and nose at her hairline. “Hathaan taunted you,” he said, “and you retaliated. That is to be expected in such a match. Would he not have done the same, had your positions been reversed?”

“He wouldn’t hurt me,” Ellana said, though the wound of era’harel throbbed a counterpoint.

“But he had never been in the position to lose to you.” A pause, and then: “There are circumstances in which anyone will act in ways we could not anticipate…or understand. Power changes even those we believe we know completely.” The cadence of his Elvhen was doleful and distant—troubled, and not by her sparring match.

“You have come into power,” he went on. “Hathaan reacted to it, and you defended yourself. You cannot fault that, even if you regret causing him harm.” He shifted slightly behind Ellana, and she tried to sit forward to allow him to move more freely, but his hold on her stayed firm. She let herself meld against him again. “Perhaps,” he said, “not all the blame lies with you.”

Ellana’s suspicions—her people’s mistrust—rose, but his embrace and doting touch tempered them. She waited, breaths shallow, for him to say more.

“The magic I taught you is not kindly enchantments and wards. It is not mild or tame. It was made for war.”

Ellana said, “You spoke once of Sylaise wielding fire as a warrior.” It had been in answer to Ellana naming her goddess of hearth and home. Hearthfire, Fen’Harel had said.

“We were all that,” he told her gravely, “and our enemies formidable. We shaped ourselves and our talents to match them, though we never did. Standing on a battlefield, they would always triumph.”

“But you won the war?” asked Ellana. For all the histories of the People she’d inscribed on her heart as apprentice to the Keeper, none of them cast the Creators in battles as great as Fen’Harel described.

“We did, and we have tried in the time that has followed to craft our magic to something more than warfare. In many ways, we have been successful, but to those for whom bloodshed is instinctive, it is all too easy to bring to bear.” His hands stilled at her middle, as if for emphasis—or in contrition. “That is not what I intended to impart to you, Ellana, and if it caused you pain, I am sorry. I would undo it if—”

“No,” she interjected, sharp enough to shave her doubt of him away. “I asked you to teach me, and the spell…I made it. This is my mess, not yours, Wolf.”

A contemplative hum resonated through the prominent apple of his throat, where it was nestled near the base of her skull. “Your language is unlike any in Elvhenan. ‘More.’ ‘Wolf.’ ‘Fade.’” He added impishly, rubbing his forefinger under the swell of her left breast, “‘Ellana.’ Is your name common amongst your people?”

“I’m the only one in the clan with it,” she managed to reply around the distracting weight of that breast spilling over his finger as he pressed it to the underside. The sensation chased off the remnants of her melancholy, and the twinge of guilt for letting them go so easily was weak and fleeting.

“And Lavellan is the name of your clan?” asked Fen’Harel. “That you all share?”

“Most of us. But if someone joins from another clan, they aren’t called Lavellan. They keep their clan’s…title.” There was no word in Elvhen, as far as she knew, for surname.

“Are there many who come from other clans?”

“We have seven now. They’re bondmates to, ah, mix the blood?” She ventured, to make herself clear: “Not every Lavellan shares family blood, but we eventually would, if bonds weren’t made with other clans.”

“‘Bond,’” Fen’Harel said, his accent in Common far more dignified than hers in Elvhen. She tamped down a flare of annoyance for how easily—and handsomely—all things seemed to come to him. But Deshanna would scold her for resentment of a Creator, regardless of which. He continued, “An intriguing word, and concept. Both foreign to the empire.” His thumb slid along the side of her breast, slow but not idle. “Will you tell me another word?”

“Any word?” she asked. Those that came immediately to mind were not useful in conversation beyond a bedroll.

His deep, regular breathing made for the loudest sound in the ensuing pause, the veilfire burning silently and the thunder at last worn out. “What,” he said, “is solas in your tongue?”

Though Ellana hadn’t looked for it since their first meeting, the rune Fen’Harel had drawn on a smooth, dark flagstone lay hidden beyond the reach of the braziers’ light, imbued with his preening and:

“Pride.”

She heard the damp click of his mouth opening, as though he might repeat it, but when he spoke, the ring in his lip grazed her ear: “Say it in Elvhen.”

A tremor went through her—flash fire want lit by the small point of gold. She whispered, “Solas.”

His grip at her breast tightened, and the fingers of his left hand spread to cover her belly, where her burning blood pooled. She felt his exhale, more humid than storm air, on her cheek as he said, “It is a fine name, from your lips.” His brushed her temple. “As is ‘Wolf.’ It has been a refrain in my thoughts these past six weeks.”

“Six?” said Ellana. A question still, but wearied rather than incredulous. What hopes she’d had that the time interval between the Marches and Arlathan would not have grown were quick to fade as she said, “It hasn’t even been a full day here.”

Fen’Harel traced the rim of her navel, tender where it should have tickled. “The puzzle vexes me as well, but I have not been afforded the opportunity to contemplate it.”

Apprehension skittered over Ellana’s shoulders, cooling the desire. “I’ve kept you from studying the Veil,” she said. “With lessons. I should’ve—”

“No,” he said, fast and sure. “That is not what I meant.”

The reflexive apology Ellana bit back came, to her surprise, from his mouth: “Forgive me. My temper is not for you. Matters in Arlathan have been taxing, and it was that I spoke of.”

Ellana couldn’t be certain he would welcome her asking any more than apologies, but said, “Is it the same as last night? When you were…unsettled?”

“You put it delicately,” said Fen’Harel, with bitter amusement, “and I should be grateful, but I am under no illusions about my appearance then. Or that it was you to steady me. For that I am grateful.”

She might’ve offered the same for how he held her now, but for his continuing: “There is unrest between the stewards of the empire. The…gods. I had hoped that victory in the war would sate them, but with no enemies at the tips of their blades, they have only each other.”

Ellana had committed many stories of the gods’ squabbles to memory, though Fen’Harel's gravity didn’t have the well-practiced beats of a Keeper’s tale, with a tidy moral tacked on.

“I have been attempting to reach my oldest friend among them,” he said. “Her influence goes far beyond mine, and she could put a stop to this, but my pleas have gone unanswered. She has not been in the city since I left you. I have tried her door every day to no avail.”

Whose door?

But Ellana had an inkling. Among the four goddesses, only one shared histories with the Dread Wolf in which he didn’t play at trickery; and so it was all the more treacherous when, in the darkest versions, he struck her down.

“Mythal.”

“Indeed,” said Fen’Harel. “All Elvhenan hinges upon her in this, and she ignores me.” His voice rumbled in his chest: anger, but with a vein of—was it grief?

With her fingertips, Ellana rubbed the knobby bone of his wrist; paltry comfort, but better than a muttered platitude for strife between them she didn’t understand. “Is there no one who knows where she is?”

“Oh, I am certain Elgar’nan does,” Fen’Harel replied, “but you saw the aftermath of my last audience with him. I have not been eager to repeat it.”

To stand before the god of retribution, All-Father and sun-tamer, Ellana would have been cowed too. She asked, “What will you do?”

He mimicked the strokes of her fingers on his wrist against her stomach. “I do not know, but I am no better suited to inaction than the rest of them. Even Felassan tires of my pacing and ‘dour disposition.’ He threatened to drug my wine to spare him my footsteps through the night.”

Ellana, affronted, said, “Who is he to threaten you?”

Fen’Harel chuckled. “A voice of good sense, in most instances. He was my second in the war: a powerful mage and brilliant tactician whom I trust implicitly. He is also a hart’s ass with a cutting humor, when he is of a mind.” Fondness had taken the place of sorrow in his tone, and Ellana was glad for it. “Slipping me a sleeping draught,” Fen’Harel said, “is the least of the threats Felassan has been forced to make when I am…difficult to reach. I expect he will relish the solitude for the days I am away.”

Incredulity, rearing its head at last, stirred Ellana in his arms. He didn’t restrain her from turning to look at him. “When you’re here, you’re gone for days?”

“It was two upon our last meeting,” he said. The veilfire lit the angles of his face, the bits of gold winking, and cast on his cheekbones the shadows of short, fine eyelashes a shade darker than the hair on his head. “Time does not stop for us, it seems.”

“But won’t you be missed?” asked Ellana. “Does Felassan not worry, if you disappear for days? What if Mythal returns and you aren’t there to speak with her?”

Fen’Harel raised his eyebrows. “Are you trying to be rid of me?”

“No!” she said, his jacket slipping from her shoulder in her vehemence. Fen’Harel’s gaze tracked to that place, then down to her bare breasts. Had he been anyone else, Ellana would’ve grasped his dimpled chin to make him look her in the eye. She settled for a clipped tone worthy of the Keeper: “All Elvhenan hinges upon you meeting her, you said. That is so much more important than”—she glanced down her front to where his hands rested at her hip—“my lessons.”

His expression hardened, any suggestion of levity banished. “Is it? The trials in Arlathan are grave, it is true, and though Clan Lavellan is not an empire, it is your home and if your place in it depends upon your skill with magic, then it is gravely important…to you.” The tinge of violet that came with strong moods bled into the blue of his eyes. “So important that you were willing to offer yourself to me in exchange for those lessons. Do not think I treat it as something done lightly.”

He spoke with conviction, and she believed him, apprehensions about his toying with her hollowed and crumbling. Still, she said, “But it’s nothing compared to the affairs of the gods.”

Fen’Harel bore down on her then, his thumb digging into the supple spot inside her right hip bone. “You are among my affairs,” he said, “or had you not noticed?”

With Ellana’s indrawn breath, his jacket fell away entirely, exposing her to an early evening that was no longer biting; the veilfire had heated the shrine, and Fen’Harel her.

His gaze didn’t wander this time; he kept it on her face as he said, “I may not yet understand what magics bring me to this place, but I agreed to prepare you for the contest for First, and I will see it through, regardless of what passes in Arlathan.” He inhaled, narrow nostrils flaring. “Unless you wish to end our lessons.”

“No,” said Ellana, “but maybe I’m not made for them.” Not talented enough, she meant, to work the spells of the Creators. “I could hurt someone else.”

“Magic is dangerous,” Fen’Harel said. “Is that not why your Veil exists? To contain it?” She nodded shallowly, and he caught her chin. “Do you doubt me when I say you have the ability to learn—and to know when to use restraint?”

“No,” Ellana said, and against the direst warnings of her people: “I trust you.”

“Then put Arlathan out of your mind. I do, when I am here.” Stroking the vallaslin under her lower lip, he looked to her mouth, and for a wild, disbelieving moment, she thought he might kiss her. But he withdrew his touch and asked, “What will tonight’s lesson be, then?”

Ellana felt leaden at the prospect of spellwork, the sparring match and sprint from the meadow having caught up with her—and the weight of remorse, in spite of Fen’Harel’s reassurances. “The Veil,” she said.

He cocked his head, quizzical. “It is a mystery to me. You could teach more of it, I think, than I could.”

“Exactly,” said Ellana. “You can study it. Finally. I’m not…up to a lesson, after today. Is that all right?”

 “Of course, it is,” he said. “You are tired. And I would appreciate the opportunity to explore this place.” Glancing at her nakedness, he asked, “Are you warmed enough?”

Her wet clothes lay in piles nearby, and she shivered to think of putting them back on before the veilfire dried them. “May I wear this?” she asked, indicating the jacket.

“You may keep it, if you wish,” he replied.

Enticing as that was—to carry something of his back with her after he’d gone—they sat upon the evidence of what became of his things if he left them. The jacket was too lovely to let fall apart. “Just for now,” she said.

“Very well.” Giving her hip a last stroke, he went to rise.

Ellana pulled the jacket on and closed over her front as she shifted to kneel, backside on her heels. She watched Fen’Harel walk away, nearer the center of the shrine, but not inside the dark ring rainfall had made on the flagstones. He hadn’t bothered with his shirt, so the skin of his bare chest shone snowy pale against the colorful mosaics, the veilfire light catching the ring in his nipple and making it glint.

It was rare Ellana could see the Veil straight on, its energies tenacious but indiscernible, except at the edges of her vision as she drew from the Fade, or when a particularly forceful thread made itself known, as had the one that had led her to the shrine. Yet, as Fen’Harel raised his hand to empty air, the curtain appeared as pinpricks of green so tightly packed they made a whole, undulating from the place he plied. It glittered in the darkest corners of the room before dwindling to nothing again. A staticky presence remained, however, charged around him, but keeping a wary, perhaps respectful, distance.

“This has always been here?” he asked.

“Yes,” Ellana replied. “In our oldest histories, and the shems’ too. Except—” A clear and immediate prehension wakened, as if it had been lying in wait for this moment.

“Except?” Fen’Harel prompted.

“Except in the histories of the Creators.” She hadn’t questioned the omission before, but now it was startlingly glaring.

“Some things are not distorted in tales, then. This shroud does not lie over Elvhenan.” He moved his forefingers across the emptiness in front of his face, and while Ellana saw nothing, the Veil glided across the back of her neck, eliciting a shudder down to her toes. Fen’Harel turned at the peep of discomfort she made. “You are sensitive to it, and it to you.”

The first was true and had been all her life, but the second?

“I have felt it, seen it, react,” said Fen’Harel, “when you are”—a minute lift of his eyebrows—“impassioned.”

Her thick tongue choked her as she tried to speak. “I—what?”

“You feel things strongly, Ellana. Determination, ire, pleasure. The Veil responds to them. Can you not sense it?”

“Not if I’m upset or, hm, passionate.” She glanced at the forest beyond the sinkhole. “Usually where it’s quiet.”

“Strong emotions are distracting,” said Fen’Harel, with an elder’s lecturing tone. “You may not notice it in the immediacy of the feelings themselves.” He tapped his chin. “Fascinating.”

Ellana wasn’t certain she agreed. He was meant to study the Veil, not her. Though she couldn’t deny her perception of it—better than anyone else’s, in the clan or among the other mages they’d encountered in their travels. She said as much to Fen’Harel, adding, “Not that it helped with my magic. But I’ve spent a lot of time by myself, and it being there…I never felt entirely alone.”

A wrinkle appeared above the bridge of his nose. “It is comforting to you?”

The sour emphasis on “comfort” had Ellana frowning blackly. “You make it sound like something vile. It’s not like that.”

“Ir abelas,” he said. “I meant no offense. It does not disgust so much as discomfit me. The connection you have to it—perhaps like a warm blanket—is to me a smothering pall. If you had experienced unhindered magic, you would feel the same.”

“What about demons?” asked Ellana, only to realize the word was in Common; she didn’t know the translation.

“Demons?” Fen’Harel questioned in an unaccented parrot.

“The evil spirits of the Fade. They fight to pass through the Veil and cause havoc by possessing mages. Rage, desire, terror, pride. If the Veil wasn’t there, they would tear through the world.”

Fen’Harel’s moue of displeasure returned, the furrow in his brow now deeper. “Such spirits exist in Elvhenan, occasionally in conflict with those of curiosity or loyalty, courage and wisdom, but they are not evil.” Malice flashed amethyst-dark in his eyes. “I have felt spirits beyond the Veil, and it is not only these ‘demons.’ The gentle spirits are there as well. If they seek this world, it is only to be free.”

She saw the Veil glimmer around him, stirred by his temper, as he claimed it was hers. A queer satisfaction coalesced in her gut, that they shared that.

“It is permeable by magic,” he went on, “and by demons, but can a being from this world pass through it into the Fade?”

“Not by Dalish reckoning,” Ellana said, “but in the shemlen stories, mages from Tevinter used blood magic to walk the Fade. They found the golden city at the center, where their god resides, and turned it black.”

“More gods,” Fen’Harel said, tight with annoyance. “More legends. Do you believe it is true?”

“I don’t know. Blood magic is forbidden now, even in Tevinter, and mages powerful enough to pierce the Veil through?” She started to shake her head, but a wintry unease held her still. No elvhen mage or human one could manage it, but a Creator… 

Fen’Harel must have seen the dismay in her face, for he said, “It is not my place to open a portal that could fill this room with spirits, or otherwise compromise the Veil because it unsettles me. But it is an intriguing magic in its complexity.”

He returned to his exploration then, and Ellana fell silent, observing his movements about the shrine: teasing the energies in small pockets and lighting spells at his fingertips she didn’t recognize—and expected she never would. From time to time, he murmured to himself, snatches of observations and thoughts so sweetly curious—more a scholar than a deity, and Ellana smiled to herself at each.

The last of the storm-washed daylight had gone when he approached her place on the cloak again, tossing the gathered ends of his hair over his shoulder with a haughty flick. “That is enough for today. Or”—he noted the darkness—“tonight.” A soft smile for Ellana. “You gave me much time. Thank you.”

She returned the smile as he joined her, kneeling with palms on his long thighs. “Your clothes should be dry now, and the rain has stopped. You can return to your camp.”

The sphere of calm that had enveloped the shrine winked out, dread filling the void. Ellana looked ahead without speaking.

“You fear facing Hathaan,” said Fen’Harel.

“It’s not like going before Elgar’nan,” she sighed, “but I don’t know what to say.”

“I would suggest the truth. It is not the simplest avenue in every circumstance, as some like to claim, but in this one, it might be.”

Ellana’s look for him had teeth. “I can’t tell him about you.”

“Because he will want to learn,” Fen’Harel said. “So you told me last time. What I meant is that you can say that you overstepped and that you are sorry for it. You did not mean to harm him. Can amends be made?”

“Maybe,” she said. “I won’t know until I’m there. But…” The rest went unfinished, her words lost in Hathaan’s from days ago: A Keeper can’t hide from their responsibilities, and neither can the First.

Sheltering in the shrine much longer was cowardice—self-indulgence she couldn’t afford if she hoped to lead the clan someday. And yet, to see Fen’Harel backlit by veilfire, his features partly obscured by shadow but familiar enough to her now that she would know him by touch alone, desire outweighed ambition.

There was no mistaking then the Veil’s eager tremble to match hers. An emerald thread beckoned her forward to lay forefingers on his collarbone, bent at the first knuckles into the dip at its center. To her wonder, the same gooseflesh that had risen last night bloomed over his chest, and his quiet breathing stuttered.

“I have taught you nothing today,” he murmured. “You need not make an offering.”

A fact Ellana hadn’t forgotten, and one that should have given her pause. What right did an unremarkable Dalish mage have, after all, to proposition a god? But when her fingers brushed the base of his throat, the tip of his tongue touched the ring in his lip, and the Veil prickled over her skin, betraying him.

“Does it always need to be in exchange?”

Fen’Harel was still, save for the sliding of his gaze—violent-tinted—to meet hers. “It is what you agreed to. There is no other obligation.”

His caution sounded rote—rehearsed.

“If you don’t want me—” said Ellana.

With preternatural speed and deftness, his hands parted the sides of his jacket to grasp her naked waist. “That is not in question,” he said, strident, “but you were upset and exhausted. I would not press my”—derisive grunt—“passions upon you in such a state.” His thumbs stretched the thin skin over her ribs. “Though the weeks of waiting have been long.”

Ellana thrilled, triumph spiraling down her back to seat itself between her legs. He had claimed fidelity was not expected in Arlathan, but to know he’d waited lit a bonfire blaze inside her. “What if I did want them?” she asked. “Your passions.” The droll twist, almost goading, shocked her.

Fen’Harel growled, “Do you?”

She let the shucking of his jacket be her answer. It crumpled on the ground as he parted his knees to make a place for her to slot hers. Her arms came to rest on the slopes of his shoulders, bringing them as close to one another as they had been upon the altar; but the frantic pace of that meeting was absent in this one. 

Fen’Harel’s hands swept up to the swell of Ellana breasts. No spellwork lit them, but it might well have, for how Ellana’s nipples puckered, the pert peaks drawing his eye. She didn’t stifle her moan when he circled them with his thumbs, slipping her fingers into the silky hair at his nape.

“Pull,” he said.

She hesitated, uncertain of how, but a repetition of the order had her taking a handful. The tug was tentative, but the response was not.

Fen’Harel’s mouth dropped open, his head falling back and spine curving as if she’d pulled so much harder than she had—bending him more readily than she ever had a bow. The lightly freckled span of his chest and long column of his neck drew her, and she pressed her lips just under the jutting apple of his throat. Her name came as a low vibration when he said it.

Lips dry and light, Ellana followed the path toward his chin, until she reached the square point. There, she pulled at his hair to keep his face upturned—and herself from venturing farther, dangerously close to his mouth. He made her brazen, but not enough to dare a kiss.

His touch at her breasts slid away, a hasty brush of her waist before landing at her backside. Fingers spread wide, he dug them in. He nuzzled her collarbone, but Ellana boldly used her hold on his hair to steer him to her nipple. He hummed, seemingly pleased at the insistence, and indulged her with a gentle suck.

“Wolf,” she said, and was rewarded with the lightest graze of his teeth. “More!”

He broke to look up at her, violet a narrow ring around dark pupils. “Your skin is delicate. If I give much more, I will mark you.”

Ellana had seen her share of love bites, most on the tender necks and shoulders of newly bonded couples. The elder hunters would click their tongues over the friskiness of youth, even as they smiled at one another in shared, knowing memory. The unbonded who, after a festival night, appeared the next morning with a bruise or two weren’t chided, and nor would Ellana be.

Laying her palm against Fen’Harel’s cheek, she asked, “Would it hurt?”

“Not unless you wished it to,” he replied. A questioning caress at her lower back. “Would you bear a mark I gave you?”

Ellana’s nod drew a groan from him, his hold on her backside relentless. She guessed it would be reddened now, and while those marks wouldn’t last, she rather liked the idea of them, too.

Fen’Harel’s lips found the plush side of her breast, and he spoke against it “Ma nuvenin” before drawing the skin between his teeth with a skillful tongue. It did come with a tiny sting—more surprise than discomfort—but gave way to pleasure as Ellana saw how hungrily he suckled her: a lean wolf with its long-hunted meal and she an easy quarry to catch, running from the meadow straight into his jaws, her vulnerable places exposed and ready for him to savage.

She didn’t mark his fingers slipping behind and between her legs until they dipped into the slickness of her arousal. The contorted angle didn’t allow for more than the tips to breach her, but a spark of spellwork had her crying out and grasping his hair for purchase. His teeth sank into her breast once more before he withdrew, leaving a bruise that he licked in parting.

The damp spot cooled as he traced the slippery edges of her slit, sensuous but inadequate. She craved him deeper, and squirmed in wordless appeal.

“Not like this,” Fen’Harel said. “I would lay you down.”

Ellana went still, clutched by wild hope—and the prickling of nerves—that he meant to take her at last. She ceded to him as he lowered her onto her back and, hands on her thighs, encouraged her to unfold her legs. He knelt between them, holding her open at the knees, and any remaining modesty burned off under the fierce avidity of his regard.

But he didn’t move to unlace his trousers. He laid his left fingertips against Ellana, parting her with thumb and middle so he could trail the fore from the top of her sex to where she was glistening with want for him. His forefinger slid into her without resistance, followed by another, until he’d pressed them as deep as he could. She went lax on the tattered cloak—relief for the persistent ache she’d suffered since the first night; the emptiness she’d waited for him to fill.

A wet, carnal sound accompanied the strokes of his fingers shallower and deeper, without magic but no less affecting for it. Ellana lay her head against the unforgiving flagstones, tangled hair bunched. Eyes on the spidery cracks in the shrine’s ceiling, she didn’t see Fen’Harel move, only felt the heat of his breath at her center half a heartbeat before his tongue swept over it.

She shouted—there was no other word for the sound in Common or in Elvhen—her back curving up from the ground then landing hard on it again as she tipped herself up into his mouth. He pinned her with his right hand in the crease between hip and thigh.

Gasping and dizzy, she looked down the length of her body to see his long nose resting at the crest of her pubic bone. Thin lengths of honeyed hair escaping the ties framed his face as he buried it greedily between her legs: quick flicks of the tip of his tongue, longer strokes of the flat, and gentle sucks at the most sensitive place. Ellana throbbed, rising to him faster even than she had the nights before.

“Not yet,” he said when he broke from her to breathe. His lips were red and shone with her desire—his chin, too. A piece of hair stuck to it, the ends wet and darkened to brown. To see him so, Ellana’s own breath came short.

She gave a mewl of protest when he withdrew his fingers from her, but he made a low, reverbent promise: “You will not be long without.” His eyelashes swept down over his cheekbones as he bent to her again, and, making good on his word, he put his tongue inside her.

The shrine filled with quivering points of magic, unseen but vital, ensconcing her and Fen’Harel. They closed in and retreated with each press of his lips, in time with Ellana’s panted moans. She sought no permission to sink her fingers into his hair, both hands fiercely grasping. He groaned into her, nose compressed so he could force his tongue deeper.

The flagstones couldn’t have been kind to his knees, knelt as he was with hips high and bent at the waist to attend to her. Ellana felt him take his left hand away from her thigh and blearily managed to focus on the jut of his elbow at his side, the forearm hidden from her view. His work at her center didn’t waver, but he grunted with a few short jerks of his arm, then sighed. A heated exhale bloomed over Ellana as he found a steady back and forth motion: tell-tale. As he tasted her, he stroked himself.

Ellana’s fingernails scraped over his scalp, an inkling of spellwork paired with a firm tug. He fumbled back from her slit, giving a clipped “Ah!” and a curse in Elvhen that made her toes curl. The look he aimed at her scalded. “Do you intend for me to finish before you do?” It was snarled, challenging and wicked. Ellana’s sex pulsed in answer, and while she was sure it couldn’t be seen, Fen’Harel’s eyes dropped. He clicked his teeth against the ring in his lip, the steady strokes of his cock unbroken.

“I will not allow it,” he said. “Not until I have felt you break on my tongue.” A brush of his long nose against her inner thigh. “I have longed for that in these weeks, and I will have it, Ellana.”

She nodded mutely, beholden to his wishes as a Creator, but no less ready to grant them to him as a man. She relinquished his hair, and like a beast slipped its lead, he dove back in, licking from her slit upward, to where she needed him most. Sensation surged from that place out, starbursts behind her eyelids and across her chest. She cried out for Wolf, raising her arms above her head. The threadbare cloak, twisted in her fists, tore an inch.

Climax built so swiftly and so strong that she couldn’t measure the rising pulses until they reached a fever pitch. At the cusp, she looked down to see Fen’Harel’s determined mouth covering her, concentration drawing a fetching line between his arched eyebrows. He worked his cock, and knowing he chased pleasure while he saw to hers brought her to the edge. A last lave of Fen’Harel’s tongue shattered her: legs shaking and back arched infinitesimally more with each wave.

He saw her through it, but only just. She was still muzzy and boneless as he sat up and, taking his trousers by the loose waistband, pushed them ungently down. He wore nothing beneath, the lines of lean muscle inside his hips guiding her gaze to the trimmed patch of brown curls at the base of his cock, taut testicles lightly furred. Ellana had but a moment to admire the shape of him before he had taken her by the waist to raise her.

“Your back to me,” he said, a command not to be questioned.

Ellana let herself be turned on her knees to face the altar. Fen’Harel knelt behind her, legs parked on either side of hers. “I will not take you like this,” he said, “but…” His cock prodded under her backside, where her thighs met. She parted them enough for him to press into the void, sliding through the slick mixture of her lust and his saliva.

“Tighter,” he murmured, and she clamped her legs closed. Hissed against her ear: “Yes. Like that.” His arms snaked around to her front, hands splaying across her stomach and over her breastbone. With no better place for her own, she held his wrists.

The first thrusts were shallow, but lengthened as he slickened himself on her, until he was gliding in the clutch of her thighs. His hips met hers in a primal clap of bare flesh, the tip of him dragging across the top of her sex. It ignited a second fire—startling. Her body had never been ready again so quickly, yet the coil of need for release had already wound tight. She leaned back into Fen’Harel’s chest, canting her hips to find friction.

He gathered her to him, fully aware of the subtle reawakening. “You can come again,” he said, lips and golden ring tracing the underside of her ear.

Ellana hummed confirmation, letting her head drop back onto his shoulder as he stroked along her throat.

“Close,” he mumbled. It could have been said for either of them; he was shuddering behind her, and the fervid grunts of effort he made—uninhibited and sensual—shook her to her core. Magic and clan, gods and the empire through the eluvian—none of it mattered as they rose in tandem, mussed and slick with each other, toward shared ecstasy.

“Ellana.”

Her name sent ripples through the Veil, a repercussion of Fen’Harel’s need that she could sense against and under her skin, compelling her to join him. She reached up and back, into his hair, as he gave a final hard stroke of his cock against her. A pinch at the join of her neck and shoulder accompanied the rush of climax, and Fen’Harel’s muffled groan. He juddered behind her, hot spend striping her thighs.

In the moments after, a hush enveloped the shrine. The time Fen’Harel had claimed didn’t stop for them seemed suspended, the Veil motionless and its flickering fire a steady, consecrating glow. Ellana knew her heart beat and her lungs filled, but they were secondary to the thrum of his pulse against her back and the damp spot—surely bruised—at her neck that his teeth and tongue had left.

“Did I hurt you?” he asked.

“No,” Ellana replied.

“Good.” The press of his lips to the bruise elicited a silent gasp. It was a kiss; the first he’d given her, and so tender. She nearly moved to chase another, but he said, “Come, I will see you rid of my mess.”

It was hers, too, between her legs, and despite the spend cooling as he shifted away from her, she didn’t feel unclean. Still, she took the shirt he offered—his—and set to wiping their leavings away. He attended to himself after, and Ellana tried not to be overt in watching. She was no stranger to nudity, but those bodies had not been his; she wanted to see, to know, every part of him.

However, when he stood, he tugged his trousers back up, going to where her clothes lay abandoned on the stones. He picked up the woolen tunic and scowled at it. Ellana hid a smile behind her fist for the Dread Wolf wrinkling his nose in endearing pique at Dalish homespun.

“It hasn’t dried,” she ventured.

“No,” he said. “It should have been laid out. You cannot wear this on a cool night.”

“I’ve done worse,” Ellana said. She got to her feet, making to retrieve her trousers. “I can change them when I get back to camp.” And though it dimmed the afterglow of her pleasure, she added, “Before I see Hathaan.”

“You are ready, then?” Fen'Harel's blue-eyed gaze on her was rueful.

She yearned to stay, maybe seated back on the cloak with his arms around her, speaking in quiet tones until her clothes were fully dried, but she couldn’t; and Arlathan waited for him. “I’ll come again tomorrow,” she said.

Fen’Harel approached, damp shirt in one hand while he brought the other to her cheek. “Would that it was tomorrow for me.” His fingers trailed over the place on her shoulder where he’d bitten her, and to the bruise at the side of her breast. “In weeks, these would fade, but when you come to me again, you will yet bear them. Knowing that, I can stand the time.” He pressed her shirt into her hands and went to find his jacket.

Ellana fought her damp clothes on as he untied his hair, combed his fingers through the disorder, and skillfully plaited it to hide the worst of the knots—her handiwork.

They came to stand before the eluvian, their reflections side by side in the parting Ellana was growing accustomed to.

“In Arlathan,” Fen’Harel said, “there is a wish of good fortune: ‘Hunt well.’”

Ellana lifted her eyebrows. “We say the same.”

“Then you know what I mean when I wish you that in what you must face with your clan.”

“And you,” she said. “With the unrest. With Mythal.”

His face shuttered, and Ellana, sorry for that, reached for him. He lifted his eyes to hers in the mirror, a measure of light returning to them, and clasped her hand.

“Hunt well, Wolf,” she said as she slipped her fingers free. His twitched back toward her once before he raised them to light the eluvian. It bathed his soft smile, warming Ellana as surely as his embrace had, and then he was gone.

Chapter Text

The elemental iron tang of blood, grisly and immediate at the moment of casting, did not linger in the resultant spellwork, consumed by light and energies ostensibly the same as any other potent magic. But venture beneath the surface and the innervated core would always show: lifeforce, given willingly or unwillingly to fuel it.

Blood magic is forbidden, Ellana had said, and yet Solas had needed only minor excoriating spells to uncover the true nature of her Veil: an ugly construct of roiling magics soaked in red.

His passage through the eluvian from the sunken shrine lifted the oppressive cloak, but the despair under his skin could not be so easily shed. Beyond the bloodstained barrier, the pain and rage of spirits Ellana called “demons” swirled in violent furor. Solas had maintained equanimity for her sake, but barely, when confronted with the urges for destruction and vengeance that filled the Fade—corruption of the spirits’ true natures by their imprisonment.

Grief strained his lungs, as excruciating as the first breaths had been after his transformation, but the spirits’ anguish was immeasurably greater; they had not chosen to be trapped and perverted into something they were never meant to be.

Pride.

He had bade Ellana say it first in her language and then in his as he had cradled her, bare and storm-scented, against him. She had whispered his name, his lips grazing her sensitive ear, and the Veil had shivered with her lust—with his. That had proved more tenacious than sorrow, for all else had fallen away with his jacket as she had shucked the pretext of their bargain.

Does it always have to be in exchange?

So simple a question, but it had sailed as forcibly as a spellwork spear to pierce his presumptions, shattering the certainty that she took him only for the magic he could teach.

Unfettered, he had laid her out before him: the supple plane of her belly; the dark fan of her hair beneath a round and flushed face; the swell of her left breast bruised by his mouth; the delicate pinkness at her center, tasting of sweet musk as he thrust his tongue inside. And after he had feasted, when he had frantically gathered her to him to rut between her thighs, it had taken a force of will not to smear the mess of his spend across her smooth skin and howl his triumph.

He might have, in the throes of his pleasure, had he not bitten the graceful sweep from her neck to her shoulder. The mark he left had been flagrant against her light complexion, albeit hidden once she had put her damp tunic back on. Solas had choked down his annoyance, and the startling compulsion to rend the wool so he could see his claim. What awaited her among Clan Lavellan would not be helped by questions of how she had come by the mark, no matter how ferociously he wanted her to name him.

But as what? He had bade her speak solas, yet she did not know him by it. To her people he was Fen’Harel, a forbidding title she had diminished to Wolf.

His desire roused at the echo of her shouting that name with each spasm of climax, fistfuls of his hair tight in her long-fingered grip. Timid as her initial pull had been, it had slaked a thirst built over six slow-crawling weeks, the ache of Ellana’s absence compounded by Mythal’s.

He had been turned away yet again by his friend’s servants—in her employ long enough to know not to fear him, despite his unfriendly mood—and bound for more restive pacing in his residence when the eluvian had borne him to the shrine. Relief at finding himself in the veilfire light had been short lived, however, when he had laid eyes on Ellana, bedraggled and shivering.

Worry had made him brusque in undressing her—a pragmatic matter of warming her in the hastiest way he knew: shedding her wet clothes and bringing her chilled body against his heated one. And he had been that, want stirring inevitably with her naked in his arms, but it had dwindled with her upset.

She had, as Solas had expected, won victory in her sparring match, but not without the rival coming to scathe. A bloody nose and wounded dignity were trifling considering the deadly purpose of the magics Solas had honed over centuries of war, yet he had been willing to take a measure of the blame for Hathaan’s suffering if it meant alleviating Ellana’s. He had not been surprised when she had refused the gesture, gratification blossoming beneath his breastbone that in claiming fault she acknowledged the considerable gifts she possessed. The spell she had used to fell Hathaan was far more than she had thrown at Solas in their practice bout, and with further tutelage, her skill would only grow.

And she did wish to learn more, but no longer for a price. That charade was done after tonight, when she had given herself not as an offering to a false god for his wisdom, but to a man she desired.

Solas turned to face the eluvian, as if it might carry him back to her if he hankered powerfully enough; but where he expected to find the peaked gold frame of the mirror in his bedchamber, this one was wrought of silver branches twining toward the sky. And the reflection he saw in it was not passion-mussed in linen and brocade, but battle-worn, with splashes of gore across hardened leather.

He stumbled back a pace, blinking, and the illusion dissipated, but his pulse thudded to the marching pace of countless battles this mirror had delivered him to. Among the first eluvians June had crafted, it had been installed in Mythal’s tent on every campaign, and stood now in the private chambers of her home in Arlathan.

Ears pricking, Solas could make out a susurrus of voices from deeper inside the house—beyond the residences, in the halls and salons. He caught strains of music, too, and the bustling footsteps of servants. Mythal hosted a gathering.

Ire scorched the back of his throat. For weeks, the house had been empty and his letters pleading for an audience had gone unanswered, only for him to be delivered to a party when the empire teetered at the cusp of civil war. Anaris, in his glibness, had been the one to drink and dance before a battle, and sometimes Sylaise and Andruil had joined in, but not Mythal. She had spent her nights preparing for the morning’s fight, in conference with Solas, whether at the table in their tent or under the furs. And even then, she had never chosen pleasure over duty.

Her room, lit by glowing embers in the hearth and sconces of white mage fire, was unchanged since Solas had last been in it—months ago, he realized, before Elgar’nan’s banquet, when a smile had chased him out of the hall and through an eluvian to the shrine. He had taken great solace in days and nights spent with Mythal in this room, but the sameness of centuries seemed suddenly stale, even false. The Arlathan he had hoped for—the abiding peace he had been promised—was a veneer, and it was cracking from his heart outward. 

To his left, the heavy cherry-wood door swung open. The din of the party entered with a gowned figure, then was cut off again with the click of the door’s latch. Mythal, radiant in cloth-of-gold skirts, strode uninterrupted from the threshold to the vanity, where Solas could see the handsome flush in her cheeks—from amusement, not drink—reflected in the looking glass. Her eyes were clear as they settled on him.

“So, Felassan delivered my message after all,” she said. “He promised he would, but after three days of silence, I could not help but wonder if he had held it back.” Fingers at her temple, she played at adjusting the placement of her headpiece, but it was perfectly situated in thick black hair made with a hot iron into a fall of spirals. The nonchalance did nothing to conceal the dark displeasure that cut shallow troughs at either side of her mouth.

“He would do no such thing,” said Solas, quick and sure. “Honor binds him, and respect. If you summoned me and I did not come, it is not his doing.”

“Peace,” Mythal sighed, laying her palms on the vanity’s top. “I meant no offense to Felassan. You need not bark to defend him.”

Solas’s jaw tightened at hearing Elgar’nan and his prize insult in her exasperation: casting him as a dog nipping at her heels. It made his voice small as he said, “I would have come before, but I was away.” The inside of his jacket abraded his skin, a stark reminder that he had left his shirt, besmirched with the leavings of his body and of Ellana’s, in the shrine.

“And rumpled by the road, I see.” Mythal turned to survey him from dusty bare feet to hair braided untidily. His scalp tingled with the memory of assertive fingers.

“I came directly to you,” he said. Not a lie, but the next was: “When I received your message from Felassan.”

Mythal plucked at the ribbons that served as laces for her fitted bodice, cut low to display the creamy tops of her breasts. “Interesting he managed that just now, when he has been here all evening.”

Solas had set and fallen into his own trap, and spoke another weak lie from it: “A note, like those I left for you every day for six weeks.” The frustration of so many wasted visits pushed him toward her. “I begged for a private meeting in each one.”

“And now you have it,” she said. “Though only for as long as it takes to refresh myself. I cannot neglect my guests. Had you come sooner…” An arch lift of her right shoulder landed the chastising blow.

Solas swallowed his reflexive apology, settling it leaden in the pit of his stomach. He said, “I did as you asked. I followed Anaris and his allies, bought information from their servants and slaves, but he is no fool and I”—an echo from the crystal hall—“have little talent for subterfuge. Something of which Elgar’nan reminded me when he claimed your task was a diversion, so I would not interfere with your alliance.”

“Elgar’nan enjoys the sound of his own voice,” said Mythal with a dismissive flick of her fingers. “My request was earnest. We could use that information.”

“Of that I am sure,” said Solas, putting to words thoughts he had lain with in growing dread since his meeting with Anaris, “but will you use it to prevent a war, or to win it?”

Mythal favored him with a sorrowful look, approaching in a shush of luxuriant fabrics. “I fear war is unavoidable. Perhaps it always was, and my request was one of feeble hope.” She set her hand against his chest. “You have always inspired that in me.”

He felt the gentle pressure through his thick jacket, tempting in its assurance, but sidestepped the offer of comfort. “If that is so,” he said, “tell me the truth. Do you intend to rule at Elgar’nan’s side?”

As if conjured, a booming laugh they both recognized came from the party beyond the door, and a call for more red wine.

Mythal said, “You know that wisdom is not his greatest virtue. He can take power and he can wield it, but it is a brute force. He needs a tempering hand.”

“Yours,” said Solas, as equally pained as accusatory.

Mythal wore severity like her gleaming general’s armor. “You cannot believe an empire will stand without leaders to guide it. Would you have them be Anaris and his ilk?” A scornful cluck. “He is a peacock, nothing more, and will not defeat us.”

Us. In it Solas heard Elgar’nan and Falon’Din, Dirthamen and Sylaise, Andruil and Ghilan’nain, June—and himself.

“We must stand united,” Mythal continued, “and when we have our victory, I will be at Elgar’nan’s side, and you will be at mine. As it has always been, my love.” Her pointed fingernails rasped against his cheekbone, drawing him down. He went, as he always had, but it was not her rouged mouth he craved.

Mythal inhaled, lips parted, only to halt a hairsbreadth before she landed the kiss. “Oh, you have found a way to occupy your time that was not fretting about me.” She sniffed, nose wrinkling. “You did not even bother to rinse your mouth after it was in her cunt.”

Solas reeled back at the crudeness, enough for Mythal to toss her head in disdain. “World-born,” she said, “by the stink of her.”

Like a hound’s hackles, the hair at the back of Solas’s neck stood up: affront on Ellana’s behalf.

Mythal lifted her winged eyebrows. “Such pique. That is unlike you, Solas. Who is she? Certainly not one of the noble daughters; you are above their artless flirtations. No, it would be someone less assuming. Perhaps a servant girl? Have you at last released Felassan from that duty?”

“I would not misuse a servant so,” Solas snapped, “as her master.” Although, a niggling of guilt reminded him, he had playacted a god to sate his lust, an arguably worse trespass. But stronger than his misgivings was Ellana’s voice—What if I want them? Your passions.—and the weight of her arms around his neck as she made certain he did not mistake her.

“Not a servant, then,” said Mythal. “But still world-born. And you were absent three days. She is not in Arlathan. Who—”

“She is no one,” Solas said. “A dalliance.” Another poor lie, and with it came a stab of shame for speaking coarsely of Ellana, who had been, and tasted, honey-sweet to him that night. He drew his lower lip into his mouth to chase what she'd left on it.

Mythal followed the motion with a hard gaze, and he knew he had betrayed himself. “You, my wolf, do not dally.”

She said it in Elvhen, of course—fen—and coolly, unlike Ellana’s desirous whisper in her Common tongue.

“Perhaps there are things about me you do not know,” said Solas, “since you keep your own private stratagems.”

The ambient magic in the room charged with anger, though Mythal’s tone was even: “Do you believe you are owed my every move?”

“No,” Solas replied, holding his position as he had before the titans’ ground-shaking advance, “but neither are you owed mine.”

Her shock came as a flinch so minute that few but Solas could have marked it, steel sliding swiftly into its place. “Guard your lover, then, but I will not have you when you are still smeared with her.” She turned her back to him, a charge away rather than retreat, to peer into the glass above the vanity. The pink of good humor in her face was gone. “Go and wash the road from yourself,” she said to Solas. “I will send Felassan to you.”

Solas bit his tongue against a protest, insisting his friend should remain and enjoy the gathering, but the insinuation that he would withhold Mythal’s summons slithered a warning down Solas’s back that Felassan’s welcome had been worn out with his own.

“I will await him at the door.” Solas looked toward it, yet his feet stayed planted, his gaze moving back toward Mythal. She met it in the mirror, her unkissed mouth curving up at his hesitation. Only when she tipped her head in a last dismissal did he go out.

Avoiding the party proved no challenge. Solas slipped through the servants’ passages, having designed them himself during his decades of interest in architecture. His own home was his invention as well, and he was eager to be in it, away from here.

Mythal worked quickly and Felassan was swift. He was already on the street when Solas stepped into the free air of the starlit night. His clean and fine clothes, the smoothness of his unbound dark hair suited a party, and he did not overlook Solas’s dishevelment. But he said nothing of it as they fell into step, too wise to ask what had transpired before they were beyond Mythal’s domain.

Only when they had rounded two corners and could see the rise of the hill that would take them to the house they shared did Felassan say, “I didn’t know she had returned until she appeared on our doorstep to deliver an invitation to her ‘gathering of friends.’” At the dubious cut of Solas’s eyes toward him, he went on: “Supposedly, but she was looking for you. Whether or not she read your letters, she knew you had been seeking her.” His deep voice was brackish. “I said I would tell you of her visit when you returned that evening. But you—”

“Did not,” said Solas stonily. 

Won’t you be missed, Ellana had asked, if you disappear for days? What if Mythal returns and you aren’t there to speak with her?

While it proved she had had the right of it, Solas felt no regret for the choice he had made to stay. Mythal would not have been swayed any more three days ago than she had been tonight, and that resignation dulled the sharpest edges of the pain. And Ellana.

“Lost your shirt this time, did you?” Felassan said, his sobriety altogether too easily supplanted by jests. “Better than another cloak, I suppose. Easier to replace. Have you discovered why eluvian blood magic takes clothing as a toll?”

The remembered rage of imprisoned spirits and the skin-crawling sense of his own entrapment enveloped Solas. “I have yet to grasp the workings of the transit, but there is greater blood magic at work in that land. I told you of the Veil…”

When he had recounted his discoveries, Felassan rubbed wrinkles of revulsion from his tattooed brow. “The amount of blood such a spell must have demanded—”

“And power,” said Solas. “Ellana’s well is deep, but she could not weave spellwork of such magnitude.” Feeling the thrum of energy among the threads, he had wondered if even he was capable of it.

“She does not know it’s blood magic?” Felassan asked.

Solas shook his head. “She spoke of it fondly, not unlike a companion. And it is…interested in her.” He could still feel its waves matched to the pulses of her second climax, when he had followed her into ecstasy.

“It is not the only one,” said Felassan. He didn’t balk at Solas’s warning look, rather pressing on, “Our house is not so large that I don’t hear the occasional, hm, interlude, especially when they are midday.”

His raised eyebrows should have brought a rush of embarrassment for that particular afternoon, when Solas’s frustrations—with matters in Arlathan and with the uncooperative eluvian in his bedchamber—had built to boiling and would not be laid to rest by anything other than hurried strokes of his cock. Felassan had gone to the market, or so he had thought when he shouted for Ellana as he came, longing for her hand in place of his own. 

“You’re thinking of her right now,” said Felassan at Solas’s telling silence. “Good. You deserve a lover who will bed you well.”

“She is not my lover,” Solas said, by rote. Though tonight had revealed the boundary their bargain had imposed had been more tenuous than he dared believe. “We have not— I have not taken all I could.” A hard bite down on the ring in his lip did not mask the longing as he said, “I have not even kissed her.”

Felassan, stopping in front of their door, grasped his upper arm. “Fortunately, my friend, that is something you can remedy when next you meet.”

Solas exhaled through his nose. “I do not know when that will be.”

He received a matching sigh in return, and saw ruefulness in Felassan’s brown eyes. “Leave it to you,” his friend said, “to refuse the affections of anyone in Arlathan for centuries only to find what you want in a woman you see at intervals you cannot guess, in a place on no known map, shrouded in blood magic. You have never made things easy for yourself, Solas.”

Whatever Solas might have said in reply was lost in a burst of orange flame on a rooftop across the district, followed swiftly by another that bathed Felassan’s features in yellow. Both he and Solas turned to see two more balls of fire sailing from Anaris’s citadel where it floated above the city.

“It has begun,” Felassan said, humor gone with the assault. “I had thought Elgar’nan would make the first move, but—”

“He will not take long to retaliate,” Solas cut in, “and the others will follow.” Mythal among them. She was a terrible force, when the battle called for it.

“And so shall we?” asked Felassan. He studied Solas, and Solas knew without a doubt that he would follow if he was called to arms again. Temper surged that Mythal would question his honor, even if only to taunt her loyal second. Fear and heartache gripped his sternum like sharp-nailed fingers, but he pried them loose one by one as another volley of fire crossed the sky.

“I will not fight for Elgar’nan’s ambition,” Solas said, “and his chaining of the People. If Mythal is complicit, I will not fight for her, either.”

Approbation shone beneath the markings of their regiment upon Felassan’s face.

Solas, astounded, asked, “You are so ready to defy her?”

“I hoped you would,” his friend replied. “She made me flesh for your service—no, don’t argue with me now—and I will go where you lead, but this time it should not be with her. Maybe even before…” He trailed off, shaking his head. “For all the wisdom you have offered her, she heeds only what serves as a means to her end. I do not want you—us—to be those means again.”

A stinging pressure built behind Solas’s eyes, and he grasped Felassan’s forearm tight enough to hurt. “We will go, then, while they fight here in the city.” A wince as he began to hear the wails of those caught in the first volley. The People would be the ones to suffer most in the squabbles of the firstborn.

“Go where?” said Felassan.

“The mountains,” Solas replied. “Where we camped in our travels those centuries ago.” Together, they had explored lands of the newly named Elvhenan and stood among snow-capped peaks, the spines of the fallen dreamers.

“There is nothing there but rocks and ice,” Felassan said.

“We can change that,” said Solas.

Felassan, mournful, looked up at the darkened windows of their home. “I will miss this house.”

“As will I."

Another burst of flame, far closer this time, spurred Solas through the door, Felassan right behind, both conjuring mage fire in their palms to light the way.

“Pack only essential things,” said Solas as they arrived in the sitting room, their separate rooms at either end. “Warm clothing, blankets, enough to eat until we can hunt.” Yet, though the open door to his bedchamber, he caught a flickering reflection of the flame he held in the tall eluvian within. It was far too large to bear with them in a hasty flight.

“I’ll prepare the wagon,” said Felassan, stepping up to his side. “The hart is sure enough of foot to pull one mirror.”

“It could be of use,” Solas ventured, “to reach the Crossroads. Ferry supplies, if we need them. And Mythal knows its match. If she comes to see the folly of this war, she can find us.”

Felassan nodded agreement, touching Solas’s elbow. “Wrap it in those blankets we’ll need, hm?” he said, and slipped away to his room.

Solas went into his own, where his wardrobe—missing two cloaks and a shirt—and his long-untouched battle staff waited, but he passed them by to stand before his eluvian. Mythal could indeed seek him through it, and he hoped in time that she would, but when he set his fingertips upon its still surface, it was Ellana Lavellan he reached for.

Chapter Text

A white moon sailed on the crests of retreating storm clouds, lighting Ellana’s way from the edge of the forest toward the pale backs of huddled halla in their meadow. Sleepy sighs and one disgruntled bleat marked her passage to the outskirts of the clan’s camp, then deeper into it, where all was quiet at the late hour.

But weak yellow candlelight glowed inside the belly of the Keeper’s aravel as she approached it, each step a wet squelch over grass lying flat from the hard rain. Her feet left a darkened trail up the ramp and inside, where Deshanna sat at the central table, the three wicks of a sturdy beeswax candle burning in still air. Her solemn regard summoned Ellana to join her on a wooden bench facing the back of the aravel, where the cot stood, a lump of blankets and a splash of black hair over the pillow: Hathaan, facing away and snoring lightly.

“How is he?” Ellana asked.

“Well,” the Keeper replied. At Ellana’s bewildered look, she sighed through her nose, making the candle flames waver. “He was shaken up by the blow and the nosebleed looked frightful, but he was on his feet not long after you left us. I let him sleep here like he used to when he was a little boy for comfort, not because he was badly hurt.”

The dread that Ellana had borne, heavier with each stride away from the shrine, sloughed off her back, but not without leaving a filmy residue of regret that it had happened at all. “Ir abelas, hahren.”

“That you must say to Hathaan,” Deshanna said. “What I wish is to know where you came by that spell. It is not one I taught you.” Her vallaslin dipped into shallow troughs in her brow. “It is like no magic I have seen among our people.”

Not among the Dalish, but it was elvhen-made—as ancient and extraordinary as Fen’Harel himself. He was possessed of a god’s immeasurable knowledge, and had imparted some to Ellana, yet in the husky, wanton sound he’d made when she’d tugged his silken hair, there was no mistaking he was a man. His clever fingers had caressed the boundary of the Veil, leaving a sparkling trail of green, and they had lit her skin and inside her, along with his tongue. She brought her thighs together under the table, hiding from the Keeper’s view the stirring of desire, and its throb at her shoulder where he had bitten her.

“I asked the Creators for their wisdom,” she said, “and they saw fit to grant it.”

Deshanna folded her hands on the tabletop, the single tap of one forefinger the only tell of concern. “I have not known you to turn to them, perhaps even when you should—to pay more than cursory honor on their feast days.”

The note of admonition niggled at the wounds of many unanswered girlhood prayers, small agonies Ellana had been willing to bear in hopes that her pleas for aid in her spellwork would be heard. But when only silence had greeted her, she had stopped inviting the cuts.

Except those she made on her palm at the Dread Wolf’s altar: a dangerous oblation. Yet, he had scolded her for cutting too deep and taught her to mend the flesh, when the other Creators had left her to bleed.

“The Keeper, above all,” said Deshanna, “must know the gods. It is her duty to seek their guidance in leading the clan.”

“And thereby the duty of the First,” Ellana intoned. “I’ve heard your lessons, hahren, and I’ll heed them, if I win victory in the contest.”

“Was that your appeal?”

Ellana nodded and the Keeper’s reserved poise gave, first in the expelling of breath, then the rounding of her shoulders. She said, “For many years, it has been mine as well: that the Creators would help you to tap the strength my teachings could not. Perhaps it was both our prayers they heard.”

There was anguish in her voice, and a brand of relief, too, that had Ellana laying her hands over those that had guided her for twenty years, roughened and practiced and offering the legacy of Clan Lavellan. She had reached for it with outstretched arms all her life, only to stumble time and again. Another Keeper might’ve withdrawn, expending her efforts on the greater of her two apprentices, but Deshanna had held fast to the belief that Ellana might find her feet, awaken her gifts, and be worthy of succeeding her.

Gratitude made for a shining light in Ellana’s breast, but its edges were darkened by the grim knowledge that no matter how much her mentor had sought to help her, she wouldn’t have called upon Fen’Harel; and if it was he who had come to Ellana, the rest of the Creators were as deaf to the Keeper as they had been to her.

“If it’s a god’s will that I become First,” Ellana said, “and someday Keeper, I hope to care for our people as much as you’ve cared for me, hahren.” She squeezed the Keeper’s fingers and was given a gentle smile in return.

At the back of the aravel, Hathaan mumbled in his sleep, shifting with a restive dream, and Deshanna sat upright again, donning her elder’s mantle of composure. Ellana drew her hands back to attend to her as she said, “These magics you have been gifted…such power can be a boon for all Dalish. You must share them.”

An objection caught in Ellana’s throat with the remembered scent of clean skin and felandaris; a caress along the underside of her ear; her greedy elation at Fen’Harel’s insistence his lessons were for her alone. But he hadn’t forbade her from teaching the spells, and had she not already put his healing to use among the clan?

She could do yet more with the other magics: the layered ones made for combat could defend their people from unfriendly shems; veilfire could keep hunters warm when it was too damp for true flame, its runes marking places of safety for elves, unbeknownst any others; and Sylaise’s spell… Ellana bit the center of her lower lip, where Fen’Harel wore the golden ring in his. No, that one belonged to her. 

“Ellana,” said the Keeper, prompting after her too-long silence.

“Yes,” she said. “Of course, I’ll share them. The First does what’s best for the People.”

“Then we’ll start tomorrow. You can make your apologies to Hathaan, and amends in your teaching.”

Ellana ducked her head—deference as much as confirmation. “Yes, hahren.”

“Go rest, da’len. You will need your strength. Or”—Deshanna glanced toward the cot—“perhaps it is we who will need that to wield the Creators’ spells.”

An uneasy fear cramped Ellana’s stomach. If she, so middling a mage, had learned the spells, no doubt her betters could. Perhaps they’d even surpass her; and she would have to accept that for the good of the clan. They needed the strongest guardian, and if that proved not to be her…

Rising on watery knees, she said, “Goodnight, Keeper,” and left the aravel before fear showed in her face.

A dry bed and blankets awaited her at the western side of camp, and the exhaustion of a long day and night was seating itself in her bones, but she slipped east instead, past the murmuring halla and the stone wolf that guarded them, to the forest’s edge.

Emerald flame leaped to life in her palm, setting the rune she’d laid into a tree trunk to glimmering. If Hathaan and the Keeper were to learn to conjure veilfire, she could no longer trust they wouldn’t discover it—and with it the path to the shrine. Beckoning with her left hand, Ellana drew the sign of solas from the tough bark. It shone bright for a moment and then unraveled before her, lost to the greater whole of the Veil.

Duty bound, she would give the Dread Wolf’s magic to the Dalish, but the man she would keep for herself.

“Steady,” Ellana cautioned as a current of Fade energy glided past her cheek to join the spellwork Hathaan held between spread hands. He glowered at the luminous mass, as discontented as the magic, which flickered and foundered with the new addition. Ellana bit back another correction in favor of demonstration: she enticed the threads of the Veil to part for a gossamer stream of energy to slip through and twine around her forearm. She forced it down in a slow spiral, layering it fluidly into her own spell.

Hathaan grunted—annoyance and effort both—and a droplet of sweat fell from his chin to make a perfect circle on the dun-colored fabric of his trousers. Sharp jaw tight, he sought the Fade again, only to meet an irascible strand that snapped in rebellion and choked out the core of his spell. It collapsed with a pop and the smell left after a lightning strike.

“Fenedhis!”

Dispelling her own magic in haste, Ellana said, “It’s all right. We can start over.”

“For the fifth time?” Hathaan asked crossly.

“I wasn’t easy for me at first, either.” Though she hadn’t struggled in the shrine half as much as he had in the shadow of the Keeper’s aravel.

They had met there in the early morning, mist gathered around Ellana’s ankles as Hathaan had descended the ramp, tying his dark hair back into a tail at the nape of his neck. His clothes, though clean, had been wrinkled from being slept in, but his gaze shone sharp and aware as he settled it on her.

Before she could offer the apology she’d lain awake rehearsing in the night, he’d said, “What’s done is done, but you will teach me that spell.”

Another matter that had kept Ellana from her rest; but, setting her hands on her hips, she’d stood by the decision she’d made before daybreak: “No.”

Hathaan had narrowed his eyes, sky blue fast turning stormy. “The Keeper said—”

“I’m to show you how to make spells,” Ellana had interjected, “but not that one. It was improvised, and not everyone’s head is as hard as yours. Aim it at the wrong person and—”

He’d cut her off with a wave of his hand, needing no further explanation, or jibe. “Is it true it’s the gods’ magic?”

Ellana had nodded.

“How did they reveal it to you?”

She’d considered a score of spun fictions, each more abstruse than the last, until she’d settled on the only one both simple and convincing enough that she herself would believe it: “In dreams.” Not so far a reach, since Falon’Din’s chosen were known for their portentous visions.

“In dreams,” Hathaan had parroted, “we walk the Fade. Can you be certain it’s not demons impersonating the gods?”

Ellana had raised her chin in bullish outrage. “You think I’m so weak-willed that I’d fall for demons’ tricks?”

“They can be insidious. Anyone can be deceived.”

“Even the Keeper? Even you?” The last had been loosed with a poisoned tip aimed for his pride, but his mild shrug had set it off course.

“It’s possible,” he’d said.

“But not likely,” Ellana had countered. “If you really think it’s demons, you don’t have to learn.”

He’d leveled her with steely conviction. “The First would never refuse such valuable magic.”

Ellana’s hackles had lowered as if a hand, gold and silver rings glinting, had smoothed them down her back. “Then we’re agreed.”

Deshanna had arrived then with a square of oilskin they could lay on the sodden grass. The three mages had knelt together, and for a moment all had been silent, until the Keeper had prompted: “Ellana, this is your lesson.”

Shaken from a pupil’s familiar waiting, Ellana had felt the Veil shift and coalesce around her, bolstering. She had reached up to stroke it as Fen’Harel had, and a faint line of green shone in response. She’d turned to an astounded Hathaan and said, “Let’s begin.”

Only he sat with her now, Deshanna having been called away by the mother of a sick child some hours before. Ellana had been content to release her; she had taken to layering the spells with competence, if not ease. But she had bid Hathaan stay until he could adequately make and hold one.

“Come on,” Ellana said to him. “We’ll go again.”

“In a moment,” he groused. Planting his hands behind him, he turned his face up to a cloudless sky. His chest stretched as he inhaled, the apple of his throat more prominent than months before, as he shed the remainder of his boyhood.

Ellana kept her own hands folded in her lap, despite the itch in them for what permutations of spellwork she might craft instead of rehashing the foundations. She had twice snuck in small flourishes, the white corona of her knotted spell shivering with new potential: an explosive flash of light to disorient an opponent or a thrumming force to stagger them. Neither were as potent as what she’d thrown at Hathaan in the sparring match, and by design. They could fend off a pack of shemlen without harming them—more use to the Dalish than lethal spells that would only earn retaliation.

The magic I taught you is not mild or tame. It was made for war.

Fen’Harel had spoken in a timbre colored with loathing, for the spells maybe, but more so, Ellana suspected, for their purpose: the bloodshed he’d claimed was innate in the Creators, that had won them their victory and now had them turning on one another. Even the All-Mother, whose gentle hand stewarded the People.

Sunlight made stark her tree-like vallaslin on Hathaan’s brow and chin, worn as his pledge of protection and justice; well suited to a Keeper. As were Ellana’s—Ghilan’nain, the guide—but she had lacked his surety in choosing them, as confident in Mythal’s gracious blessing as he was in his magic.

But as Ellana peered at the black ink, she heard Fen’Harel’s sorrow at his friend’s absence, his pleas for her to intervene going unheard. Could she be so gracious and just if she was indifferent to him? Prickling resentment compounded the itch of boredom at Ellana’s fingertips.

Her spurring Hathaan came more brusquely: “Again” as she nudged his shin with her bare toes.

He jerked his leg out of her reach before she could land another kick, forcing him to sit up. She met his vexed look with eyebrows lifted in challenge. “Fine,” he groused, though he adjusted his weight on his seat bones, making ready.

In tandem they sought the Fade, Hathaan’s gesture fluid, elegant as Ellana’s casting had never been. Yet the energy she drew in uncomplicated summons made an obedient rill; Hathaan’s bucked his command, tumbling like frothy meltwater over stones.

“More will,” said Ellana, “less performance.”

His glare was lost in concentration as he coerced the energy to ball up.

When Ellana said, “Well done,” she meant it. While these magics hadn’t come to him as quickly as they had to her, each attempt improved upon the one before. “Add another layer,” she pressed.

He did, and she laid one to match, then a third and a fourth. The brilliance of their spellwork caught the bits of glass that hung from leather thongs above them, throwing shards of color against the wooden flank of the aravel.

“One more,” said Ellana.

Hathaan hesitated when she didn’t move to seek another layer, instead watching him guide his into the swirling mass now too large for his palms. It pulsed and sparked with threat, lighting his hawkish face from below. Ellana’s lungs stilled for fear it would come apart like the others, but the stream of energy was subsumed into the greater spell and glowed contentedly.

“That’s it!” she exclaimed. “Hold it just like that. Balance it. Once you can do that, you’ll be able to build anything you want.”

“Something to knock you on your arse?” Hathaan said. It lacked any real bite, and when Ellana laughed, he grinned back at her. The spell didn’t waver.

Not until the Keeper spoke, startling both apprentices. “That’s enough for now.”

Ellana brought her hands together, smothering her spell. Hathaan’s went out with a snarling complaint that had him rearing back.

“You will need to practice more,” said Deshana, approaching in measured paces, “but after you’ve done your chores.”

“As you say, harhen,” came the chorus, in harmony with the rumble of Hathaan’s stomach. Ellana’s too reminded her that they hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and the afternoon had deepened.

Deshanna’s thin lips curved up. “I’ve laid out a meal for you on the table. Come.”

When they’d sat, Hathaan wasted no time breaking a round, acorn flour-dusted loaf into three and using the small knife he wore at his hip to cut a thick wedge of cheese. Ellana drank from a wooden cup of elderflower wine before attacking her own portion.

Deshanna sipped tea. “The two of you will choose a story to tell around the evening fire tomorrow.”

A slice of apple halfway to her lips, Ellana stopped. Hathaan, coughing around a mouthful of bread, fumbled for his wine cup to wash it down as she said, “That’s the Keeper’s honor.”

“It is,” said Deshanna, “but soon one of you will be First, and you must learn to share as well as to keep our histories. It is time you began to take those responsibilities.”

Hathaan peered at his reflection in the wine he held or over it to Deshanna, but decidedly not to the place beside him, where Ellana sat. “How should we choose our story?” he asked.

“I will not always be here to tell you such things,” Deshanna replied. “I give you the choice so that you might remember that.”

Chastened, he set his wine cup aside.

“But,” she went on, “you might tell one another, so that you don’t decide on the same tale.”

Ellana, pressing the edge of her nail into the crisp meat of the sliced apple, doubted they would. Hathaan’s favorites were the battles of the splendid Emerald Knights of the Dales, of Shartan’s liberation in the Exalted March against Tevinter, and the humbler histories of Clan Lavellan’s own heroes and their modest deeds. Her thoughts ventured elsewhere, following a line as distinct as a Veil thread to vibrant mosaics: richly garbed figures carrying torches of white mage fire and glass spires that reached purple heavens—the days of the great empire of Elvhenan, when the gods walked among the People.

Yet even as Fen’Harel came to her decked in all its glory, he spoke of vallaslin marking the faces of slaves and Creators who waged wars harrowing enough to spoil his taste for violence. With his appeals to Mythal, he claimed to want peace, not to sow chaos, as in legends of his betrayal.

More gods, he’d said of the shemlen myths. More legends. Do you believe it is true?

Ellana was certain there was some truth in the Chant of Light, just as there was in the elvhen histories, but she was coming to suspect that time and distance had distorted them more than any Keeper could guess.

Before she chose her story, she would hear a counterpoint from Fen’Harel’s lips.

Chapter Text

Past dawn, the disk of the sun filled a cleft between easterly peaks, dashing gold into the pass where two dun-colored tents and a firepit made a meager camp. For all its brightness, it held little warmth, and Solas put up the fur-lined hood of his cloak as he stood in the powder that had fallen overnight. The hush was a welcome respite from meaner midwinter storms, their cutting winds and heavy snows chasing him to shelter in his tent with pages of charcoal drawings: the stronghold that would stand in this place as a safe haven from both weather and war.

“One little eluvian won’t be enough to bear in materials,” Felassan had said the evening last, when he had flipped through the pages by mage firelight. “It’s barely much use for supplies for two, let alone builders, timber, and stone.” A frown at the bitter dregs of tea in his mug. It was the last of the supply brought from Arlathan and unreplenished given the limited corridor between the mirror and its match in the Crossroads.

Solas forced down the rest of his own tea. With little else hot to drink, he was coming to detest the stuff. “I am aware of that.”

“Ah,” Felassan said, bracing one hand on the three-legged table, over the design for a west-facing balcony, “you have a plan.”

“The makings of one,” Solas replied, swatting his friend’s arm away before he smudged the details of the drawing.

In five steps, he stood before the eluvian, in it the reflection of cheeks blanched and hollowed by lean rations on the long journey. He had laced the fur collar of his tunic up to his chin and reluctantly removed the adornments from his ears, lest he risk frostbite. The bits of gold in his nose and lip he had left, and he tongued the latter as he regarded Felassan in the mirror. “Do you know of any eluvian made by a hand other than June’s?”

“No,” his friend said, arms crossed over his broad chest. “And he has never readily offered the knowledge.”

“Nor have we asked,” said Solas.

Felassan lifted his heavy eyebrows. “You cannot mean to seek an audience with him in the middle of a war. Not when we spent a month climbing this brisk mountainside to avoid it.”

Solas, no fonder of their situation, said, “I am not so foolish as that.”

“Then what?”

“When last I was at Vir Dirthara—”

“Looking for the Free Marches,” Felassan cut in.

Solas nodded once, curtly. “Tucked beyond a row of caged scrolls, I came across a vessel of memory I believe may be his.” The round-bottomed flask had stood in a case lined with unblemished glass, reflecting it back on itself in infinite halls.

“It sounds like June’s work, it’s true,” said Felassan. “But it cannot be all he knows of eluvian-craft, in a single flask.”

“I agree,” Solas said, rubbing the ring he wore on his left middle finger.

“But,” his friend pressed, “you are confident you can puzzle out the rest.” He rapped his knuckles on the top of the table in two dull strikes. “To what end? Making a larger eluvian for us?”

“That, and to untether it from a single other. Vi’ravas.” The solemnity of his voice caught Felassan’s true interest, his violet eyes attentive.

“A freedom of ways?” he asked. “Is it possible?”

Solas would not have thought so once, but he knew of one mirror that could bear him to it from any in Elvhenan and return him to another entirely. That magic had been wrought somehow, and if he could unlock it, he might open all the empire to himself and to Felassan—behind the lines of both sides of a war that had now spilled out of Arlathan.

At Solas’s silence, Felassan rubbed a thumb over the vallaslin on his chin. “It’s not a bad plan, if you can make it work.”

“Your confidence in me inspires,” said Solas wryly.

His friend threw him a lopsided smile. “You cannot do it alone.”

“No.” Though he had attempted to discern a way in which he could. Infiltrating the library, occupied as it was by Dirthamen’s regiment, came with no small risk of capture.

“Then I will scout ahead,” said Felassan. “You were wise enough to place your eluvian in the Crossroads near to Vir Dirthara’s. I can get there undetected.”

“It will be guarded,” Solas said. More likely by spirits than elvhen soldiers, but formidable ones. “Do not destroy them, if it can be avoided.”

Felassan squared his shoulders, a gesture only possible given his form, but his resoluteness was as pure as Loyalty’s had ever been. “You know I won’t.” Collecting his cloak, he donned it, doing up the clasp at his neck. “I wonder,” he said, “what more you might learn of eluvians from June’s memories.”

Solas did not waste his breath asking after Felassan’s meaning; there was no mistaking it, or the pang as his friend said, “How long has it been since you’ve been through?”

“Three days,” Solas replied. A gesture toward the drawings. “I have been occupied.”

“Indeed,” said Felassan. “And who could want for better company than your work? And me, of course.” Solas’s churlish mien did nothing to deter him. “Come daybreak,” he said, “I’ll go to the library and be back, with hope, in a day. Your dreamed-up stronghold won’t collapse if you’re not here when I return.”

Affording Solas no time to rejoin, he had swept out of the tent, a bitter night breeze admitted as he had gone. Despite its chill across Solas’s face, the air in the tent had grown close, the presence of the eluvian more imposing than his friend’s had been. A resentful spike of anger had demanded he take the cup he had drunk unappetizing tea from and lob it at the mirror’s surface, but such a paltry impact would not harm it, and neither would it coerce the thing to carry him to the shrine.

Teeth gritted, he had kept his back deliberately to it, stalking to the table and his drawings of a long bridge approach to crenelated battlements, sturdy towers, and a vaulted great hall. It was too much for him and Felassan alone, but the spirits of the Crossroads whispered of and lamented the suffering of the People caught between Elgar’nan and Anaris’s battles. The snowed-in passes through the mountains could not bring refugees to the safety of the stronghold, but vi’ravas could.

The corners of the drawings’ pages had been stained with black fingerprints. Solas had turned them one by one until he reached the last sheet. It was absent designs and careful measurements, sketches made from memory in their stead: a round face and sturdy chin; a prominent nose; lips curved up at the corners and parted just slightly, as if she were ready to speak.

Ellana Lavellan.

On sleepless nights, as the frigid wind slithered into his tent, he had drawn studies of her eyes and the curve of each brow above them, including the swirls of Ghilan’nain’s vallaslin. He had rendered her fingers laid over her collarbone and brushing through the waves of her hair. In one they were outstretched to cast a spell, or to seek something beyond the page.

Solas had scoffed at his presumption—at having shaped her hand in the image of his own desires, denied him with each passage through the eluvian. Stretching the intervals between attempts allayed the rush of hope and then cutting disappointment when cool magic washed over his skin only to deliver him to the Crossroads and not to the shrine.

Letting the pages of his designs fall to cover Ellana’s face once more, he had pinched the bridge of his nose, eyes shut against the yearning to spin on his heel and walk through the eluvian, and against the fear that it would yet again rebuff him.

He would go to Vir Dirthara to retrieve June’s memories for the sake of the People, but Felassan knew as well as he did that he craved the freedom of ways to find his own—to her.

An eagle’s call broke the sunlit calm of the morning, its shadow passing over the camp before it dove for prey out of Solas’s sight. She was a finer hunter than he, and would feast while his empty stomach echoed. He could not avoid the eluvian today, to slip between other mirrors in search of provisions. Stolen, of course, and not always from the stores of the nobility. Regret made those meals taste of ash.

Following the prints his feet had made in the soft powder, he returned to his tent, shedding his cloak. It would be unneeded in the temperate climes of the Crossroads, and would constrain him when he needed to be fleet.

An empty leather pack he collected from nearby the table, shouldering it before twisting his hair, in want of a wash, into a knot at the crown of his head. The pots of melted snow warmed by mage fire were sufficient to clean his body, but he missed the deep copper tub at his home in Arlathan—which had likely burned with the rest of that district on the night he and Felassan had fled.

Fury brought him to the eluvian in long strides. It was a relic of another war, but any weapon could be repurposed, had one the necessary tools. He would make quick work of this errand and then return to await Felassan’s news of the library.

But as he woke the mirror’s spellwork and stepped through, it was not the magic-thick atmosphere of the Crossroads that greeted him, rather the scent of pine and damp earth, lambent veilfire light, and a young woman in homespun and leathers smiling in welcome.

Ellana’s gaze followed Solas’s pack as it dropped to the flagstones, shed as easily—too easily—as the purpose with which he had charged through the eluvian. Obligation was lost in her blue eyes and the minute purse of her lips, a ready word on them, just as he had sketched her: “Wolf.”

In her Common tongue, the name made a balm for the places her absence had chafed: tender points beneath the heavy layers of his clothing she had brushed with her fingertips and claimed with clement puffs of breath.

And he was not the only one marked from their last meeting. The open collar of Ellana’s shirt revealed a dark edge of the bruise he had sucked into the join of her neck and shoulder. Had she displayed it so unabashedly among her people, or had she undone the buttons and parted the edges of the wool for his benefit alone?

His blood stirred at the notion of her slipping into his sanctum and by the light of the fire making herself ready for him. Stood before the eluvian, fresh from her doe’s sprint through the forest, had she bared the lover’s brand for him to see?

Going to her, he took her hand.

“Cold,” she murmured at his touch. “Is it winter in Arlathan?”

“I took leave of the city,” Solas said, “four months ago. When the war began.”

Ellana’s warmer fingers tightened around his, her expression hardening like burnished steel. “Mythal didn’t stop it. Did she even bother to see you?”

“There was an audience,” he replied, offering nothing of the circumstances of it—forced upon him only moments after he had left her—or of Mythal’s derision at her world-born tang, “but the outcome was not what either of us had hoped.”

“What did she hope for,” asked Ellana, “if not peace?”

“For me to stand as her lieutenant, as I agreed to be long ago.” The promise of a recurrent headache lanced under the shallow scar on his brow, where once he had proudly worn the marks of her regiment, first in paint and then in blood. But he said to Ellana, “I could not follow her in this.”

The spines in her tone retracted as Ellana rubbed the peaks and valleys of his knuckles. “Ir abelas.” 

“As am I,” Solas said, “but not to be here.”

Her handsome smile curved as she cast a glance over her shoulder. A woven blanket lay across the flagstones, replacing the tattered remains of the two cloaks he had left. A modest meal had been set out on it: petite apples in a tidy pile beside a wooden bowl of soft white cheese; slices of cold meat with coarse pepper clinging to the edges; a loaf of bread dotted with sunflower seeds; and a corked wine skin, round with fullness, lying between two clay cups.

The growl of Solas’s stomach came shamefully loud, but Ellana’s broadening grin chased off any embarrassment. Would that he had brought paper and charcoal to capture her so sweetly.

“I don’t have to ask if you’re hungry, then,” she said.

Gazing on her face, Solas said, “Ravenous.”

He let her lead him to the blanket, and to draw him down onto it at her side. While his mouth watered at even a simple repast, he was sorry for her to relinquish his hand to serve it.

“Elderflower?” he asked when she had spilled wine into a cup for him.

“Clan Lavellan’s oldest recipe. And my favorite.”

“As it is mine.” Raising the cup in a wordless toast, he drank. The flavor of petals and honey bloomed on his tongue, fine but not as satisfying as Ellana had been upon it. That appetite, however, would wait until more than wine filled his belly.

Tearing a piece of bread from the loaf, she offered it with the bowl of cheese. Solas held up a hand to refuse when he caught the strong aroma.

“I am sorry,” he said. “I cannot stomach halla after one long march, when it was all there was to be had.” The meat more so than the milk, after he had cut the throat of the foundering beast that had borne him faithfully that ill-fated campaign.

“Sometimes I tire of it, too,” said Ellana. She nudged the peppered meat toward him. “Ram.” Solas took it gratefully, along with a plain bit of bread. As he chewed, Ellana picked up an apple to roll it in her palm. “Where have you been,” she asked, “if you’ve left Arlathan?”

“Far to the south,” Solas replied. “Overland and across the sea. We traveled for two months.”

“‘We?’”

“Felassan accompanied me.” And would return from his scouting to an empty larder while Solas ate well. Swallowing the remorse with more bread, he said, “We visited the place once before, and while he is not enamored of the cold, the mountains afford us security.”

“Is there snow?” Ellana said.

“Yes.” Too much, by his reckoning, but the wonder in her face kept him quiet on that subject. “Are your winters too mild for it?”

“It snows once or twice a season, but it’s gone the next morning. Nothing like Ferelden or Orlais, where it covers the whole forest. The clans from the south say everything becomes perfectly still and white.”

“I know the effect,” said Solas, “though there are no trees near our camp. So far up the mountainside, it is ‘nothing but rocks and ice.’ Or so Felassan says. He will be happier when our stronghold is built.”

Ellana peered at the mosaics that surrounded them, the crystal spires and sky-cradled citadels too delicate for wartime. “I’ve never been to a castle,” she said, “or a city.”

“The Dalish do not build cities?” asked Solas.

“We did, a long time ago, when elves ruled the Dales, but they’re ruins now. The cities belong to the shems. Any elves in them live in…” She furrowed her brow, fiddling with the apple’s stem until it broke off. She tossed it away. “I don’t know the Elvhen word for it. A district that isn’t well kept? Where people are poor and sick.”

Solas, his food sitting suddenly ill, said, “A slum.” Ellana hummed assent, and he set his bread aside. “There are no slaves in your Thedas, but the People do not thrive?”

“The Dalish do,” she ventured, then with another glance at the mosaics made a somber addition: “In our way.” Tucking her legs to the side, she asked, “What will your stronghold be like?”

A diversion from grimmer matters, and though the puzzle of her world still vied for Solas’s interest, he would follow the path she cut for him, if it pleased her. “The foundations will stand on a plateau over a yawning cave,” he said, “surrounded by the tallest peaks. Its towers will not reach so high, but the walls are to be built of that mighty stone.”

“It sounds imposing.”

“As it should be. It is a fortification, not an ornament.”

With a musing tilt of her head, Ellana brushed the heavy braid of her hair over her shoulder, to lie against her back. “We met a city elf once, who said the shems’ castles are just piles of gray bricks, except for the colored windows in the great halls. At sunrise, they paint everything gold and orange and blush.”

The east-facing windows in Solas’s hall would suit stained glass, if he could find an artisan to craft them. An unnecessary amendment to his plans, but his mind’s eye illuminated the charcoal designs with jewel tones that would bathe Ellana’s pale skin as she lay beside him in an echoing hall, wearing nothing but those shades.

“When it is built,” he said, “you will be welcome there.”

“You mean…go through the eluvian with you?” Her surprise made fetching arches of her eyebrows. “Is that possible?”

“I do not know.” And would not without June’s flask, yet he was unable to contain the asking: “Were I to discover more, would you wish to attempt it?”

No breeze from the forest above reached the interior of the shrine, but a current rippled through it: the smothering Veil making itself known. Acquisitive energies gathered around Ellana, barely visible threads of a blood magic spell slithering over the eluvian. It was not a proper barrier, but Solas could recognize a warning.

“You do not have to answer now,” he said, and regardless of the unfriendly magics still close about her, brushed her jaw with the backs of his fingers. She gave a soft sigh at his caress, and the Veil retreated, leaving a tingling of animus only Solas could sense. He steered them elsewhere, setting his hand back in his lap.“Tell me, what became of the sparring match? How fares Hathaan?”

“Only his pride was hurt,” Ellana replied. “And even that healed quickly enough, as long as I agreed to teach him to build spells like mine.” Solas must have worn his disapproval, for she blanched.

“Atish’an,” he said in a hasty attempt to soothe. “The spells are yours to do with as you will. I gave no conditions. But”—he bit the ring in his lip, a curb for his temper—“they were meant to serve you in the contest.”

“And you want me to win,” said Ellana.

“Would you rather I were indifferent?”

“No, no, I’m grateful. But everything that can help the clan has to be shared. It’s how the Dalish have survived. It keeps us out of the shemlen slums.”

Solas could accept that, if it meant she would not suffer, as weak, thin, and weary as the refugees stumbling away from war-spoiled homes in Elvhenan. “You care deeply for your people,” he said, “even when they did not value you—before you were useful to them.”

She lifted one shoulder and let it fall again. “They’re my family. We look out for each other. Wouldn’t you do the same?”

Another twinge at Solas’s brow, sharp like the scar had split, running red into his eyes. “I did a great deal for my dearest friend. Things I did not want to do. Things I am not proud of.”

In memory, his dagger flashed in a cacophony of pain and terror as severed dreams twisted toward madness. The rumble of staggering titans had underlaid elvhen victory cries, and while Mythal had raised hers in celebration, Solas had been silent, his knuckles white on the hilt of the blade.

A soft touch to those same knuckles and Ellana’s accented Elvhen: “Not this time. You didn’t go with her this time.”

“No.” Around the skittering of his pulse, Solas turned his palm to Ellana’s so he could weave their fingers together, as she had his at their parting touch months before. Months for him; it had been, he assumed as envy complained against his ribs, only one night for her.

She held him fast in return, but the bow of her smile was fleeting, teeth worrying the inside of her cheek.

“What troubles you?” Solas asked.

“The Creators. The way you talk about them—it’s nothing like our stories. You’re not—” She stopped, shaking her head. “Tomorrow, I’m supposed to tell one—a story—to the whole clan, but I don’t know how I can, if they’re not true.”

“Ah,” said Solas. Unable to smooth the worry lines that wrinkled her vallaslin—those among her people’s misapprehensions—he set his forefingers at her chin and turned her face up. “Perhaps I could offer some clarity.”

“You’d do that?”

“Unquestioningly, if it is what you want.” He pressed lightly over the flourishes of ink under her lower lip. “Have I refused you a boon?”

“Never.”

Nor would he, when she looked at him with such guileless trust. His only regret would be dragging the dirt of his world into hers. “Where shall I begin?”

Ellana’s thumb rasped over the winter-dried cuticle of his, settling over the nail. “Mythal is your oldest friend?”

“She is. We encountered one another long before the founding of the empire.”

The exact point in time was impossible to guess, for time had not been known to them then, but Solas recalled Wisdom floating on impish spring gusts to where another spirit had twined itself into the shaggy coat of a she-wolf, the tendrils of its being exploring with more curiosity than he might have expected of Benevolence.

Their exchange had been soundless—impressions the language of their kind rather than words or thoughts—but Benevolence had coaxed Wisdom to join it on the she-wolf’s back with promises of new knowledge. Touch, while not in the nature of spirits, had brought exactly that, and, seeking more, Wisdom had scratched along the wolf’s neck and under her long snout, receiving a growled scolding when it had tried to trace her lolling tongue. Benevolence had guided Wisdom to be more cautious, until the she-wolf had contentedly flopped into a patch of dandelions to nap. Seedlings had floated up and away from her, along with two spirits made fast friends.

“Before Elvhenan?” Ellana said.

Solas lifted his eyebrows, as the pleasant memory had his mood. “Did you think me younger?”

“I— Well, I didn’t think of it at all.” The vexed scrunch of her nose was another expression he would have liked to capture in a drawing. “How old are you?”

“It is difficult to measure,” he replied, in earnest. “But as I am now…not yet three millennia.” Ellana’s shocked expression charmed him, and he needled further: “It is young, set against the firstborn. Only Ghilan’nain is younger than I.”

“Is it true Andruil turned her into the first halla?” Ellana asked.

“Certainly not,” said Solas, incredulous. “Some can shift their forms with magic, but Ghilan’nain crafted beasts; she did not become them.” If she had, Andruil might have hunted rather than loved her. “However, she did make the halla. They were her first invention, for our cavalry.”

“So, they were large enough once to be ridden,” said Ellana. “The histories say so, but none of our halla could manage. It takes a team of ten to pull an aravel when the clan moves.”

“Harts have greater strength,” Solas said, “but halla are swifter. Even when Elgar’nan exchanged his halla for a hart, Mythal kept hers, and it meant she was always at the head of the charge.” And he beside her.

“What else did Ghilan’nain make?”

“Many things, wonderful and fearsome. Most were for Andruil’s sport, to earn her adoration.”

“Why would she— Oh.” Ellana came up short, such intimacies presumably omitted from her people’s tales. “They’re lovers.”

Solas nodded. “From the very earliest days, Ghilan’nain distinguished herself among Andruil’s soldiers, but it was not plain ambition. Her general was first in her heart, and she committed all her cleverness and ingenuity to ensuring Andruil knew that. They have been inseparable since Ghilan’nain was raised to sit amongst the firstborn.”

“But they’re not bonded,” said Ellana. “There are no promises to seal their love?”

“Only those they may have sworn in private,” Solas replied, “of which I could not tell you. But there is no clearer devotion in all of Arlathan.”

“Then the story of Fen’Harel and the tree can’t be true.”

His epithet set him off balance, and foolishly. Of course he had a place in the Dalish stories; to Ellana he was no less divine than the others. Unease crawled between his shoulder blades for his deception and how awe might easily become anger if she learned of it.

He hefted frail humor as a shield: “I have met many trees. You will need to be more specific.” Her sidelong glance was a halfhearted rebuke. “Tell me,” he said with a squeeze to her hand.

“It only makes sense if you believe the first halla was once elvhen,” Ellana grumbled.

“Then I shall pretend I do.”

That earned him a labored sigh, but she bore herself up, donning a mantle of dignity to mime, he expected, her wizened Keeper. “In the golden days, the halla were the most beloved of the Huntress, and it was forbidden to kill them without her leave. The People did not wish to disobey, for the halla were kin to them, and the gods, as Andruil’s fellows, accepted her decree. Save one.”

Solas did not have to speculate whom.

“Fen’Harel did as he pleased,” Ellana said, “unbound by Andruil’s law. One day, when he hungered fiercely, he went into her forest and feasted upon the halla. Had he killed but one or two, his trespass might have gone unnoticed, but the score he slaughtered drew Andruil’s ire. True to her name, she hunted and captured him. She forced him out of his wolfskin and bound him to the broadest tree in the forest with silver cord.”

Not unlike that Solas had woven of magic for her climb out of the sinkhole upon their first meeting, though he did not interrupt her to say so.

“As recompense,” Ellana went on, “Andruil decreed that Fen’Harel would serve her however she liked for a year and a day: her meals, her whims, in her bed.”

Solas’s thoughts went to the slip of a servant girl in Elgar’nan’s garden, who had been no more to Andruil than a table for her wine and a stick with which to prod him when he had once again refused her advances. Perhaps there was some truth to the story; to serve her would have been a hated punishment.

“And did Fen’Harel suffer that?” he asked.

Ellana’s reply was flat: “Does it matter? It didn’t happen. Not if Andruil had a lover.”

“Oh, that has never stopped her.”

“Then the story—”

“No, it is not true.” Ellana blinked, a minute flinch back from his sharpness, and Solas was quick to soften it. “Andruil does not guard the halla so fervently, and neither do I hunt in—what did you call it, my wolfskin? It was meant for battle, and I have not shaped myself so since the war was won. But…Andruil has never been subtle in her desire for me.”

Ellana pressed her lips together, whitening them, save for the pink edges. “You’ve been with her, then.”

Was it displeasure he heard in that? It was not due, for he had told her none in Elvhenan expected—or even wanted—fidelity in their lovers; but neither, then, should he have felt the surge of answering satisfaction. And yet.

“No,” he said. “I have not sought such company in Arlathan in many centuries.” A fact Felassan had reminded him of after he had taken leave of Mythal—when she had scented Ellana on him and he had dismissed her as a dalliance.

Those words still burned acidly in his chest: a more excruciating lie than his false godhood, and proven as one by each wistful sketch hidden under his designs; by each clung-to dream of the shrine before waking to a bitter morning in a solitary cot; and by every unsatisfying climax at his own hand when it was hers he craved.

He held it now, her fingers twined with his, and yet they talked of Andruil and trees and wolfskin. A waste of what little time he had with her, while it marched stolidly past in Elvhenan. He would not squander any more.

“Ellana, how can it be that you have had no lovers? You are clever and generous, beautiful and”—his gaze tracked to the bruise on her neck—“passionate.” He watched the skin around it redden, and followed the lovely color up to her face, but it was not a flattered blush.

“Nobody wants the lesser mage who can barely draw a bow,” she said. “Well, there’s—no. If I’m not First, there will always be better choices for a bond.”

“Then they are fools,” Solas rumbled. Ellana looked to him, eyes wide at his vehemence, and he traced the healthful roundness of her cheek with his fingertips until they grazed the corner of her mouth—which he had sketched again and again, if only to stroke it with his charcoal-blackened thumb, ruing that he had not done so when he last was with her.

“But,” he said, “I will not curse them for it, if it means I am the one to do this.” Ducking his head to hers, he felt a gust of breath warm on his lips just before he kissed her.

The press of his mouth to the plushness of hers did not demand, but neither was it tentative, closed lips shifting and seeking to discover how best she liked them. He cradled her jaw lightly enough that she could move away, but sure enough to promise more, if she wanted it. 

And she did, giving her approval as a honeyed moan that stoked rather than sated Solas’s need.

He eased his hand to the back of her head, changing the angle of the kiss to deepen it; but it was not his mouth to part, rather Ellana’s, the tip of her tongue boldly meeting the gold ring at the center of his lip. A shiver went down his back, any doubt of her desire gone as he opened for her to sweep in. The elderflower taste they shared was headier than any wine.

Drawing their joined hands upward, Solas settled hers at the back of his neck. She rubbed the shorn hair at the nape, using her grip there as leverage to close what little distance remained between them. Her lithe, vital body against his and the slick sounds of their fulsome kisses made a powerful reminder that he was flesh and not spirit—that Pride, not Wisdom, could savor her and make her rise to him as she had not done for any other.

Yet, as they broke for needed breath, he said, “You have been kissed before.” There had been no mistaking that in the force of her lips: not masterful yet not untried, and ripe with eagerness. 

Ellana replied hazily, “Yes.”

“Yes,” Solas repeated in a covetous murmur, touching his brow to hers, “but never by your lover.”

Her half-lidded eyes opened to fuller awareness, the darkness of lust lightening to wonder. “No,” she whispered.

Nuzzling his long nose to hers so that she could see naught but him, he said, “Until tonight,” and kissed her again.

Lost opportunities taunted him, but on an earlier night, bound by the pretense of their agreement, she might not have so readily slipped him her tongue or pushed her fingers into his hair, unseating the knot. It sloughed to the side, and she pulled at the tie until it tumbled loose. Solas gave a deep groan when she took a fistful. The one she fed him in reply slid over his soft palate, down his throat, and to his cock.

Sweat prickled the skin beneath the jacket he wore, unneeded in the veilfire heat and wanted even less, when Ellana’s hand had come to rest over his heart; but he would have to release her to be rid of it.

She resisted when he tried, chasing his mouth, and his first attempt to explain became three urgent pecks to hers. The second was mumbled against her lips, a kiss punctuating each word: “A moment, Ellana. I will not be long.”

She complied, if haltingly, her arms dragging over his shoulders as she sat back on her heels, and Solas admired what his kisses had wrought: her bitten and glossy lips parted; rosy tongue behind her teeth; an alluring flush from her cheeks to the tips of her ears. He reached to stroke the knife’s edge of one, and the sensuous sound she made tugged him to her—not quite a kiss, lest he lose himself in it again—before putting his fingers to the clasps of his jacket.

Shadowed above the altar, the figure of the wolf kept watch: vigilant and protective at Ellana’s back while its snarl was aimed with baleful accusation at Solas. In each of their meetings, it had been Ellana undressing, readying an offering for Fen’Harel—a guise Solas had worn to selfish ends from the start. He could not regret the ruse—without it she might never have had him—but her lover, if he claimed to be that, would have long ago offered himself.

And he would tonight, bare at the wolf’s feet for Ellana to take from him anything she desired.

The free air did little to cool his fevered skin as he shucked the jacket and the woolen shirt beneath. Firelight caught the golden ring in his right nipple, which pebbled under Ellana’s gaze, ready for her well-kissed mouth to close over it; or for a curt tug from his forefinger, lancing sensation from that point across his chest and into his belly. The muscles there flexed and fluttered in an unintentional display, drawing Ellana’s attention to the waistband of his trousers and the shape of his cock underneath them.

The formal way she had once asked for permission to touch him was forgotten in a hungry reach for his laces, and tempted as he was to lie back and watch her undo them, he intended to present his offering in its entirety, as she had done for him. Catching her wrist, he brought her palm to his lips. “Let me.”

Bemusement drew her eyebrows in, and Solas lashed reproach across his naked shoulders for giving her an order, but the moue eased as he reclined on the blanket, chest open and legs extended for her appraisal. His toes curled as he traced his length, fingertips bumping over the taut laces of his trousers until he reached the knot. It took three frustrated heartbeats to undo it, and another four to work the thin strips of leather loose.

Seduction, while not a skill he had used often in recent centuries, had not atrophied so much that he was unable to employ it in the bridge of his back as he lifted his hips to ease the trousers over his backside and down his thighs. He sat upright, his middle taut, to push them along his calves and away. Sweeping the fall of his hair across the nape of his neck and over his shoulder, he afforded Ellana a view of his strong, pale back—and was rewarded with her chewing her lower lip, the peaks of her unbound breasts visible against the fabric of her shirt. His teeth clacked on the ring in his own lip for want of hers in their place.

But he would make no demands, simply stretching supine for her to do as she willed.

He hoped that would be touching him, yet she lingered at an agonizing distance, sweeping the length of his body with her eyes. They stuck at the spot on his lower belly under the tip of his cock when a delicate string of fluid slipped from it to gather there. A bedmate in Arlathan might have crooned her delight at the glistening evidence of his arousal—and he would not have objected, he was so nervy with it—but Ellana’s wonder was utterly sincere, and Solas trembled in restless waiting.

An entreaty tingled at the tip of his tongue: not the proper word, but one of two he knew in her language— more . Yet, she did not give him the opportunity to speak, reaching instead for the hem of her shirt and pulling it in one fluid motion up and away. Words withered as Solas saw the love bite he had left on the side of her breast, stippled reddish at the edges of a darker bruise, and only a day old.

She had come to him every night since their first meeting, and he had not thought of another in all the intervening months. He could not, when the fingers he had sketched page upon page grazed his claim, tenaciously worn, in their progress down her belly to the fastenings of her trousers.

She made no show of shedding them, and he did not need one, for as soon as they were gone, she was taking the place beside him, her hand landing over his pierced nipple and her mouth covering his. He yielded like hot wax under her, save for the curl of one arm around her back and the opposite hand at her buttock. She was shapely there, and plush—perfect to sink his fingers into and then soothe with gentler caresses. Her leg slid over his, bringing her front flush to his side.

Kissing her, now that he could, consumed nigh all his senses, from the prurient nibbles of his lips to the firmness of her tongue behind his teeth. They made unseeing explorations with their hands: Ellana across his pectorals, his collarbone, and around each nipple; Solas along her thigh, to the ticklish back of her knee, and up again to her hip.

His right bicep made a pillow for her head as he guided her to roll her onto her back. Presented with her creamy throat, he lunged to revisit the mark there. Ellana’s approval hummed under his lips, and she squirmed, her thighs pressed tight together.

Solas knew her need, and dragged a query down from her neck to the nearest nipple, asking against it, “Open for me?” Ensuring he was understood, he massaged the tender place above her mound. Her legs fell apart, and his fingers glided into the ample wetness between them.

He did not ignite the pleasure spell, rather grounded in his flesh by the scent of her hair, the slick beginnings of sweat where they were pressed together, and the enticing musk of her desire. She was world-born, and lesser to the firstborn because of it, but such arrogance fueled Solas’s contempt for them—for Mythal, who had sneered at lowering himself to licking common cunt when he could have had her.

He could not undo the ages he had spent in his friend’s service, but for all she had taught him of pleasure, she had never clung to him as Ellana did, never touched his body with the fervor of a being that knew no other form. There was no need for magic—the charade of lessons or Sylaise’s invention—to serve her; only his skin on her skin and Wolf whispered into his mouth as she came for him.

Or he for her. Fingers making a tight sheath around his cock, she commanded his full attention, and no small part of his body, which juddered at the unexpected contact, his lips skidding up and away from her breast as he thrust into her grip. She met him with chin ducked, a graceless collision with his nose before he found her lips again. 

What passed from his tongue to hers was shapeless—not quite words, but not wholly indecipherable, either: the rounded corner of Ellana; the beginning of a plea for more cut abruptly short with a sure stroke of his length; approbation when he laid his slippery thumb against the top of her sex and she shifted to place it exactly where it was needed.

Perhaps she lacked the practice of many lovers, but she was not reticent in passion—hers or his—and it was intoxicating.

A turn of her wrist brought her hand into an exquisite clutch at the tip of his cock, and he broke their kiss to say, “You recall how I like it.”

“It was just two days ago,” Ellana said. “And”—a glance down his front to where she held him—“I’ve thought of it.”

“As have I,” said Solas. More than he should have, even on the most arduous days of travel from Arlathan to the mountains, or when the Crossroads spirits delivered bleak tidings from the warfront. Elvhenan and the fate of the People, spirit- and world-born both, mattered to him, but so did Ellana—enough to mark her and send her back to her clan in treacherous hopes they would see and know someone wanted her when they had not.

And he did want her fiercely. She was so slick and took his fingers so well that he was certain he would not hurt her if he rolled atop, guided her thighs around his hips, and put his cock inside her. But the adept strokes of it she wielded, paired with the kisses he had longed for, were already bringing him to a precarious peak. If he lay with her in earnest, he would ensure he could last more than a handful of strokes. He owed her that; and he had his pride.

She pulsed against his thumb and clenched around the two fingers he worked within, testing his restraint. To have her constrict around him in her release… He groaned into the crook of her neck, nuzzling her jaw as he withdrew the fingers to rub the place that would have her writhing—but not crying out, for he sought another kiss as she approached the edge.

Cracking his eyes to watch as she broke, he found hers open and darkened, but intent. Though she trembled with readiness, her strokes of his cock did not stutter even for a moment. She had watched him hit his peak only once in their nights together—astride his thigh on the altar—and looked at him now as if she were starved for a reprise.

Around them, the eerie Veil rippled, thrumming with blood—not theirs but in tune with it, surging with each leap of their hearts. Its ensconcing presence made a barrier against all that waited beyond the shrine. Bound by it, nothing existed but their bodies gracelessly, vehemently knotted, and Solas was lost.

He felt Ellana join him, her teeth closing over the ring in his lip. It sent a jolt through his nerves, his spend an oblation upon the crest of her hipbone and the smoothness of her belly. She had soaked his palm, and clenched with shocks of pleasure, dwindling until they both lay still. The fervent kiss relented to brief presses between breaths: succor.

Ellana sighed when Solas slowly withdrew his fingers from her, and shivered as they grazed upward from her slit—sensitivity, not discomfort. She could rise again, he knew from the last time, but the drowsy comfort of the veilfire heat, her snug in his embrace, and his own satiation stayed him. He reached for his discarded shirt.

“Wait,” said Ellana. “I brought a flannel.”

Over her shoulder was the food they had abandoned, the basket she had presumably carried it in, and a folded length of cloth. The preparation—to feed him and to lie with him—nearly roused Solas’s desire again, but she had released her hold on his spent cock and was stirring to retrieve the flannel.

“For you,” he said when she tried to offer it to him. Their gazes went together to the lazy runnels of his cooling spend on her skin, and Solas’s throat worked as she wiped, in no great hurry, from the crest of her hip to the arch of her ribs. It was not insubstantial, what she had drawn from him.

She turned slightly away as she folded the flannel over to a clean side to mop the slippery insides of her thighs and between them. Solas accepted it when she was finished, using a dry corner on his own body.

The task had put some distance between them, a measure of Ellana’s uncertainty filling that space. Solas swept it away as he reached for her, and she let him tuck her to his side as he lay back onto the blanket. He kissed her temple, her cheekbone, and her lips, eliciting a hum. He gave one in kind when her finger found the ring in his nipple.

“Did it hurt,” Ellana asked, making a circle around the pink point, “to pierce this?”

“Yes,” Solas replied, though less so in the initial puncture and more in the healing, when his clothes had abraded it. A far cry from the pleasant caress of Ellana’s curious finger now.

“Why did you, then?” she said.

“It was fashionable in Arlathan not long after the war.” A gesture toward his face and the empty places in his ears where he had removed the studs for the winter. “As were these: adornments made of precious metals and stones we could take freely from the earth.” After its masters had been felled. He peered at Ellana’s unadulterated ears. “The Dalish do not pierce their flesh?”

“Some do,” she replied, “but we don’t love gold like the shems or the dwarves. Good ironbark for bows is more precious.” She laid her hand flat against his pectoral, thumb to the side of his nipple but not in contact. “Do women in Arlathan do this, too?”

“Certainly,” said Solas. “And not only for adornment.” At her lifted eyebrows, he shifted so she brushed the ring, and did not conceal his agreeable response. As Ellana wet her lips, he stroked his fingertips along the swell of her breast. “Does that interest you?”

“Me?” she said. “You mean pierce myself there?”

“Or anywhere else,” said Solas, nudging her ear with the tip of his nose. “A green stone here, maybe. A cuff of silver.” He had not envisioned her in the translucent fabrics women in Arlathan wore to display the golden bars in the peaks of their breasts, and could not, since they had been laid aside in favor of plate and chain for war. He said, “But you do not need such things. You are beautiful as you are.”

Ellana’s smile was all the more testament to that. “In our stories,” she said, “the gods don’t take lovers among the People.”

“Don’t they?” It was far from the truth in Arlathan, where world-born bed slaves were commonplace. “Do these stories say why?”

Ellana shook her head. “And no one’s asked, at least not as long as I’ve been studying with the Keeper. I don’t think they would dare. It would be…disrespectful.”

Solas studied the bashful downturn of her eyes—to where their legs were tangled together. “Your stories do us more credit than we are owed, Ellana, and yourself a disservice, if you do not think you are enough to enthrall me.” He assured her of it by seeking another kiss, which she delved into in return.

When they broke again, her skin was pinked down to her breastbone, and he was half-hard. He might have pressed for more, too, had his stomach not chosen that moment to growl.

Ellana withdrew her touch from where it had wandered to follow the thin line of hair from his navel to his pubic bone. “You didn’t eat very much before we— You should have something more.”

Solas reluctantly let her roll away from him and toward the food, her lithe form backlit by veilfire. “Will you not have some as well?” he asked.

“I ate at supper,” she replied.

Sitting up, Solas slung an arm around his knee. “You brought all that for me?”

Ellana peered back at him from where she knelt, the mark on her breast just visible. “If we were here long enough for me to be hungry again…”

The sultry luster of her eyes seared over Solas, and the temptation to make a feast of her cramped his middle far more than gnawing appetite. Hours more spent nude, until the shrine’s air was thick with the scent of sex and dawn haloed their makeshift bed, filtered through the evergreens above. He could not remember craving something so much.

“But Elvhenan awaits you,” Ellana said at his silence. “The castle in the mountains.”

Felassan’s voice sounded in Solas’s mind: Your dreamed-up stronghold won’t collapse if you’re not here. He was right, as he often was, but had surely returned to camp from scouting Vir Dirthara, and his intelligence would not keep if Solas stayed away too long.

“Take this with you,” said Ellana, indicating the food.

“I would not make off with what is valuable to your clan,” Solas said.

“This won’t be missed.”

If that was so, he would not refuse a second time. Instead, he went to collect the pack he had dropped at the foot of the eluvian. His lean, bare form was reflected in the mirror, its contours so carefully crafted to be lethal—and sensual. Mythal had gifted him both in the body she had forged, and while it was indelibly bound to his trespasses against the dreamers, it pleased Ellana Lavellan, and for that he could be grateful.

“Here,” he said to her, proffering the pack for her to fill. “I would not take your fine basket, too.”

She nodded and set to work while Solas gathered his clothing. He did not regret the last stolen moments to study her body while he dressed; he would sketch it in the coming interval between their meetings.

“Will you come again tomorrow?” he asked when he was once again buttoned up against the chill.

Ellana had risen, unabashed in her nudity, to pass him the pack. “I will,” she replied.

Solas traced her cheek, down her neck, and around the back of her head so he could tip it up for a parting kiss. He kept it short, but deep—savoring. The food she gave him would sate his body’s hunger, but he would yet starve, until he was with her again.

“Dareth shiral, Wolf,” she murmured against his mouth.

“And you home, Ellana,” he said, then pried himself away to waken the eluvian.

Bitter wind greeted him on the other side, seeping through the canvas walls of his tent as another storm blew outside, where it was black night. Felassan would be asleep, if he was at camp, and so Solas would wait to speak to him of Vir Dirthara until the morning.

In heavy steps, he went to a stool and shifted the pack off his shoulders. Its light weight did not go unnoticed, disquiet crystallizing in his breast, as icy as the weather. The Veil’s warning had not been subtle when he had spoken of Ellana traversing the eluvian, and the pack, empty after his passage through it, was all the confirmation he required. She would never pass with him into Elvhenan unless he could unlock the magic at work, and for that he required June’s flask.