Archive of Our Own

Breathe, breathe, breathe. A gasped exhale for every jarring footfall. The jungle air settled in Dorian's lungs, heavy with humidity. The green smell of sap was sharp in his nose, oozing from the trailing vines snagged and trampled by his fight: a beautifully clear trail for anyone with even a single eye to follow, deeper into the jungle, away from the smell of black powder and the choking smoke, the sabotaged supply bunker with its burning halo.

There'd been children nearby, and Qunari, shouting fast and angrily back and forth. Nobody else—not that he'd seen. It was easy enough to imagine the children as connected with the rebels—even easier to imagine them as scapegoats. Either way, they were children. And Dorian—well, he'd only reacted, hadn't he, like someone who didn't know better. He really was a worse person than this, and yet here he was. Perfect end to a bloody few days. He'd begun with his unit dying, which had been lovely, and then there'd been all the rest.

And so he was leaving this damn trail. Blame the battle-mage. Fire at the fingertips. Demons only a thought away. Go on.

Would it do? He could always start a fire here too—sideways through the jungle it might be visible, the undergrowth considerably sparser than the canopy—but no, that would be too obvious. It would say trap or decoy, probably—and one really preferred to go for idiot, under the circumstances. Besides, the danger of it spreading in ways he couldn't predict—no, it wouldn't do.

Maker, he needed to shave, and to sleep for an entire night with someone at his back so that he could pass on starting awake at some small jungle sound, and possibly, once he'd done that, to fuck someone who was unlikely to put a knife in his back half way through. Rather rude, really—one ought to wait until after, surely?

That particular scar wasn't even very impressive. Honestly, the mark left on his shoulder from falling against a wall one Satinalia in Minrathous looked rather more like a respectable injury sustained in a warzone.

The bright birds were screaming in the canopy above, and although it was the middle of the afternoon very little light filtered down through the dense leaves of it here, leaving the floor dim, a strange murky green. It seemed for a disoriented moment as though he had sunk beneath the surface of a still pond, ornamental fish fluttering their delicate fins above him.

No. Not that.

Dorian bent forward to catch his breath, hands to knees, the muscles in his arms shuddering, the jump of them under his skin visible. How easy it would be to get lost, too, in the fascinating horror of the body—the mechanics of it, the moving parts laid bare. A clever dwarven toy in need of fine-tuning. An anatomist's model jolted with the electric force of lightning into momentary uneasy life. A necromancer's work, spirit and body disunited and united—well, that last one was a laugh, anyway.

Holding himself as still as his rebellious muscles would allow, he listened. The birds had settled, the cacophony sinking back down into a more sporadic shifting chatter. Something moved through the curling ferns, the sound a slow smooth drag—a snake? A monkey dragging its tail? Moving away, probably. At any rate nothing human moved, and nothing Qunari either as far as he could tell. Pavus, do you mean to say you never studied wilderness survival or battle tactics with the Order of Argent? Why no, sir, I believe that would have been in the second term, and I had so very much important drinking to do that I just couldn't stick around. You know how it is.

Don't talk back. Don't talk back. Don't talk back.

He never managed that with the Order of Argent, and he never managed it with the army, and now there he was, by some shocking coincidence, shoved through training and deployed straight into the fucking jungle.

Be still.

Perhaps he should set fire to something after all. If nothing else, the exact moment the jungle caught would feel so very good.

Pointless thought.

Perhaps the Qunari had his number and nothing would really work anyway.

Would that really be so bad? Go back to the barracks and get in only the traditional amount of trouble for disobedience, take the inevitable blame for the loss of his unit, drop the whole thing? It wasn't as though he was particularly suited to being the rescuer of anyone whatsoever. It wasn't as though helping a group of children get away with blowing up Qunari supplies would do anything at all in the long run—not for anyone.

On the other hand, why on earth should one get into less trouble when one could just as well get into more?

It wasn't as though anyone wanted him to leave the island alive regardless. Well, anyone but he himself.

It was at this point in his circular reasoning that something moved very slightly in the corner of his eye. His heart kicked frantically against strangling fear. An animal, an animal—some kind of—what?

For a moment he didn't really understand what he was seeing, the form half-obscured in shadow.

It was a Qunari man, grey skin painted in elaborate patterns with the shifting greens of the jungle so that he seemed in places to melt completely into it. His horns were widely angled, more outwards from his head than backward, and the surface seemed as uneven and twisting as branches. His eyes were dark gleaming things in the dim light.

Well, Dorian thought, still caught in the desperate image of a kicking struggle inside his chest, I suppose this is what it feels like to be a lemur finding that the branch against one's back is a python.

One run and runs, and expects to be chased—the point is to be damn well chased—and instead, there's this.

He felt sick, which was fairly usual these days.

The man was very still. Properly still, not like Dorian's wretched attempt at it. Dorian wrenched himself up into a fighting stance, staff flipped out of its straps, blade angled forward.

"Hah," the Qunari said, and moved, quick on his feet considering his size, nothing like silent in his charge—and that was when Dorian realised the man had a greataxe.

Naturally.

But it was the haft of the thing that caught him in the chest, tumbling him onto his back so that his breath was slammed from him, his ribs doing something unpleasant and sharp on the right side of his chest. And it was the man's booted foot that crunched down on his staff so that the wood splintered like dry twigs, and the man's hand that pressed down over Dorian's mouth, the great bulk of him hunched above so that the flickering flight of the birds was hidden from sight and Dorian's world cast into deeper shadow.

Fire, Dorian thought. Fire, fire—he'd always been good with fire. He flexed his hand, and then thrust it up against the man's chest, trailing sparks, and focused, and—the man caught his hand, wrenching it sideways so that the fire spilled not across that broad expanse of chest but only over the very outermost curve of the shoulder.

"Fasta vass," Dorian hissed through his teeth, and kicked up hard with his knee instead.

The man grunted heavily, snarled through closed teeth, and Dorian realised his error too late, felt the pressure of the man's hand grow entirely suffocating, pulled and pulled after what magic he could reach without a focus, searched for force, for the strength of will to simply fling the man into a tree-trunk with hopefully lethal force.

It didn't quite come. Too long without rest. Too little adequate food. No lyrium whatsoever.

"Are you done yet?" the man asked, and his Common was—well, startlingly good. They carried their accents with pride, the Qunari here. Spoke well, but didn't hide what they were.

Most of them.

Dorian narrowed his eyes.

The man sighed. "Seriously?"

Dorian shrugged one shoulder slightly—a terribly limited movement given his position. Grabbed the man's wrist, gauntlet tips digging in hard, sliding for grip on the vitaar until they found the chinks in it and sunk.

Blood welled.

The man cursed violently, Qunlat shocked from him, reared back—blood drawn by a mage scared them, oh how it scared them, more than pain and more than fire—and why shouldn't it?

Dorian gasped a breath through his mouth, rolled sideways, the focus crystal from his ruined staff clutched in his hand. A fragment was better than nothing, if you knew how to use it—

And Dorian was ever so talented. They noted that specifically, the Templars, when they were explaining his case to the judge.

If the boy is so very skilled at fighting and so determined to practice the art, send him to the army. A dismissive wave. A fate sealed with a small gesture of perfectly bored disdain.

"Shit's sake," the man said. He'd got both hands back on his damn axe now. Ready. "Give it up, Altus. You gonna pull blood magic without a staff? Just can't wait for the demons to find you?"

"Altus," Dorian said. "Hah!"

The nice thing about being scared shitless was that one didn't have to reach far to find all the small spirits that clustered around death and around the people who balanced on the edge of death's unknowably deep well.

He pulled.

And oh, it did work—he could feel how the spell took, the drag of the spirits across his skin as he directed them, cool and soft. The glow of them settling into the man's skin, twisting around him, but all that actually happened was that the man's face went—blank. Some terrifying kind of blankness that suggested—

"Maker take this fucking island," Dorian said. "Ben-Hassrath."

The man smiled, entirely devoid of anything pleasant, edged with a cutting sort of bravado. "Hissrad," he said. "You done?"

"I don't know," Dorian said. "Perhaps you should call for help. You never know what I might do otherwise. A terrifying battlemage like myself? Can't be too careful."

Hissrad studied him in silence. His stance was guarded, weight forward. If Dorian ran, he wouldn't get far. If he cast one more spell powerful enough to do any substantial damage, compromised as he was, he would exhaust his resources to the point of risking collapse. Those were the regrettable facts of the matter.

His neck ached, the pain of it spreading up and across the back of his skull, down and into his shoulders. His ribs were certainly fractured—sixth to eighth, probably.

Six months and a number of life-threatening injuries ago he would have laughed and fought on anyway.

He was beginning to feel rather tired of the whole thing, tired of this moment in itself, of the worsening shaking of his muscles that meant he should have stopped while he was ahead, and also that he hadn't been ahead for several hours. Part of it was fear, of course. His mind had given up on dealing with the whole concept at some point around the moment the man refused to flinch, but his body remembered it.

Strategy. One had to try and learn it sooner or later. At least he had considerable motivation at this exact moment.

"I'm not going to be much use to you as a prisoner, frankly," Dorian said, "and I'm not looking forward to the Qamek. But here I am."

He let the focus crystal drop.

"Huh," Hissrad said. "Uh. Don't get me wrong, this is nice, but I was expecting demons."

"It was only a fear spell. You didn't even flinch."

Hissrad, in the business of fishing out rope from the loop of his belt to bind Dorian's wrists, stared down at him, hard-faced. "I'm not expecting demons because you tried to make me piss myself. I'm expecting it because you're a mage."

"Biding my time, I suppose. Could happen any moment. Getting you to shout for help really is out of the question?"

Hissrad's silence stretched out between them in a rather pointed sort of way. He moved around Dorian, wrenched his arms back in a way that honestly hurt like fuck, and got to tying his wrists, hands to forearms.

"You're the diversion for this lot," he said. "Or the bait. Get a patrol good and lost in the jungle, ambush them. Good on the guys for not biting. I'll write them a nice little note of commendation."

"You think that Tevinter blew up the supplies."

"Uh, yeah," Hissrad said. "Tevinter blew up five other bunkers around the island today. Don't see this one's special. What's your game?"

Dorian stared blankly at the trees.

"You didn't actually have a damn clue it was your guys," Hissrad said. "Great. That's great. Finally take someone prisoner and it really is the most useless guy on the island. Playing tourist or what?"

"Oh, you know. I fancied an exciting little jaunt. One gets so bored of all the silk and peeled grapes. I thought I could get taken prisoner by strapping horned men, who'd have their wicked way with me. We all have our dreams. Mine seems to be going quite well so far."

"I guess you've been told you're annoying."

"Obviously." Dorian shifted his shoulders, gritted his teeth at the way the movement pulled at his ribs, making their state more clearly felt now that he wasn't riding the wave of the fight. Something shifted uncomfortably in the region of his right scapula, too, and then refused to settle back into place again. His shoulder became a formless mass of pain, blurring outward and then settling in again, defining itself around the back of the joint and up to the top of it. Acromion? It would be about in keeping with his luck so far today. "People have very poor taste. I'm marvelous."

Hissrad grunted; got hold of the ropes around Dorian's wrists and used them to maneuver him, setting him stumbling along in front of Hissrad, the undergrowth tangling around his legs. He had an old gash on the outside of his left thigh, and he was beginning to feel that now too, the last of the elfroot paste he'd had on him gone that morning.

They moved through the jungle, keeping away from the shore with its fishing villages and the burning bunkers. The afternoon was sinking towards evening now, the sunset not far away—always fast here, close to the northern tip of the island. Dorian had been working his way South before this entire pointless incident, and it was southward that they moved now—not further from the military outpost, at least.

A thought, of course: if he could escape Hissrad, why shouldn't he escape the military? It hadn't worked outside Minrathous, but the mainland of the Imperium was well-ordered, at least in that particular respect. If he ran—

Call it an idle fantasy. Something to pass the time until he had an actual plan.

A further idle fantasy: the idea that he might actually come up with a plan.

No, don't think like that, for fuck's sake.

His ribs hurt, a sharp pain with every breath, a dull spreading pressure below it.

And Hissrad froze. Dorian didn't; was pulled up short by Hissrad's hand still wrapped around the rope on his wrists, his shoulder wrenching again so that he cried out, unable to keep the sound in. The cry stabbed through his chest, doubled him forward, and that—

"Crap," Hissrad said.

"Hey, Ata—" someone else said, breaking off abruptly to change track. "What the fuck—oh man."

"Hah," Dorian managed, a half-voiced exhale, because that seemed to more or less cover it. And then he collapsed.

The humid heat was always oppressive in the civilian houses on Seheron, and tended to fill the air with the mildew smell of cloth that had been too damp for too long, which was really the worst of it. None of that in the barracks, where they set ice glyphs along the walls, the radiating chill sinking into the skin the moment you stepped inside from the bright training yard—the humidity sinking away into cold wells.

"Drink," somebody said, tapping him on the shoulder—yes, there it was, Hissrad's lightly accented voice.

But Dorian's hands weren't tied.

Oh, to have a shoulder capable of throwing a punch.

Dorian opened his eyes. A wooden cup. Hissrad's broad horns. The wooden ceiling strung with bags of food in lines, up out of the way of the jungle creatures most inclined to pilfering. Hissrad looked—concerned? Frustrated?

Dorian tried to ease himself upright, and found that at least four different parts of his body were completely disinterested in cooperating with this plan.

"Kaffas," he said, satisfied at least at the viciousness of the word when spat between clenched teeth.

Hissrad's hand caught him behind the good shoulder; held him up and offered him the cup. It seemed to contain only water. Qamek would have been identifiable, and magebane likewise—an outright poisoning seemed a little improbable when just leaving him in the jungle as a snack for some unreasonably large cat or other would have done perfectly well.

He drank. Only water, as far as he could tell.

He was thoroughly bandaged, poultices pungent on his leg and his side, the smell of them rising as he tried to move.

"Not a prison, then," Dorian said, sinking back down onto the pallet as Hissrad released him. "Unexpected. I may be nearly as surprised as you were when I didn't turn into a rage demon."

"That's a pretty specific choice of demon."

"Well," Dorian said, "I'm a very angry man. What can I say. The spectre of bloody revenge is with me always, and so on. I suppose I could manage desire if really pressed."

Better to pretend one had actually come up with the innuendo on purpose, Dorian decided, as Hissrad's eyebrows rose slightly.

Dorian smiled. "Don't look like that. I'm very invested in sex. But possibly not this very moment."

He closed his eyes, head tipped back. Slow careful breaths to keep his ribs from spiking into fresh pain.

"Ugh," Hissrad said. "Mages. Hey, look, I've got a deal for you. Don't figure you're going to take it. But I should ask."

Dorian waved the hand which wasn't attached to a recently dislocated or possibly fractured shoulder. He didn't open his eyes.

"Got some potions here that the alchemists give us. They'll sort the pain out enough for you to sleep properly. Go to the bathroom. All that crap."

"Crap."

"Yup."

"You're doing this on purpose."

"Desire," Hissrad said. "If pressed?"

"Yes. I take your point. Tell me the bit that's going to want to set your face on fire, then, do go on. The suspense is killing me."

Dorian opened his eyes, turned his head. Hissrad was sitting cross-legged, washed clean of vitaar. He was impossibly large—larger with this enclosed space to frame him instead of the towering jungle trees. A very solid, muscular build.

No shirt, naturally. What did Qunari have against shirts?

"It's the bit about how the villagers don't want anything set on fire as soon as you're feeling well enough to stand up. You're too beat up to cast much of anything right now. I give you the potion, who knows what happens?"

Which seemed reasonable, and left approximately two possible options that he wouldn't like.

"Do they want me bound and leashed, or will they be content with enough magebane to make me vomit? Should I hold still so you can sew my lips shut?"

"I'd think a collar would be better than magebane," Hissrad said, level. "Collar someone can take off."

"Or fail to take off," Dorian snapped, mind lurching at the memory of the fucking thing they'd fastened around his neck for an hour or so when they were considering his case, as though he were a candidate for Tranquility. Just a precaution, Sir. Gets expensive if people don't take the verdict well. He hadn't even been a prisoner, not strictly. An advisory hearing only. "Stuff your potion up your arse and leave me to the business of suffering nobly, would you?"

"Yeah, that's what I thought," Hissrad said. "Like I said. Didn't figure you'd take it. I wouldn't. Well, you stay put, I guess. I got business."

"I'll give the footman instructions to admit you upon your return." Dorian waved a hand, hoping for languid but not willing to actually look in the appropriate direction to check.

Hissrad stood with a grunt, brushed his trousers off with brisk strokes of his unreasonably large hands, the thud of the fabric distinct in the close air. Turned to go, leaving the room much larger for his absence.

Outside, children were running—yelled words back and forth, the clatter of something turned over. A man, calling urgently after them. Indistinct words.

Life continued, then. Even on the bloody shores of Seheron, people tried to get on with it.

He'd seen very little of the villages. A few stops for supplies. He'd fought on the streets of Alam, almost straight off the ship and into a bloody mess of a battle, only the thudding exhilaration of fear seeing him through it, knife to the arm with the tip caught in a buckle so that it never touched the skin, the burning fire of black powder scorching his hand and forearm. Qunari camps in the jungle, rigorously neat before the fighting started. The fortified Tevinter barracks.

But of course people were fishermen, of course they hung their food from the ceiling to keep it safe, mended their nets. Of course their children played too noisily.

They were in the doorway, he realised—the children. They'd been running in his direction, and their footsteps had stopped with the rattle of the hanging bead screen that Hissrad had passed out through shortly before.

"Yeah," one of them said. "Think so."

What had the question been? He hadn't heard one.

He opened his eyes, but only in time to see the strands of the bead screen rattling sinuously back into place. The scuffle of retreating feet died away.

A more constant murmur of voices rose and fell, outdoors presumably but far away. A whole group of people now, the children's lighter voices clear among them as notes if not words. The whole of it blended with the distant sea.

Dorian drifted, not quite asleep—jolted to at sudden noises as he'd been doing all week, gritting his teeth against the pain of every sharp movement. Drifted again.

By the time the distant meeting was concluded he had given up on rest and painstakingly maneuvered himself up into a sitting position on the pallet, so that he could lean back against the wall, bad arm cradled on his lap.

"Yeah," Hissrad was saying, just outside. "Don't know why he'd do that though. He's some Tevinter soldier, right? How happy do you reckon they usually are about kids running around?"

An orphanage had burned in Seheron proper two weeks after Dorian had arrived on the island, the fire sparked with magic—no smell of fuel or powder permeating the smoke. Dorian, who had planned to spend the time firmly engaged in self-pity, had been obliged to take a detour into the business of fighting nausea, the sour taste of it spreading in his mouth.

He had taken a lot of those sorts of detours. Oh, they hadn't been wrong, the templars—he'd taken such joy in picking fights all across Tevinter. Duelled his way through a half-dozen schools and scuffled in the corridors of even more. Well, that had showed him, hadn't it—the difference between fighting and war, divided from one another by flame and choking black smoke.

The mages on Seheron were bloody, every last one of them. A slave, a civilian who happened to be too close. Their own veins if they must. The resort of a weak mind. The resort of a weak mind. The resort of a weak mind—

"You can't trust it," Hissrad said. "Them. Maybe the kids just didn't get it. The 'vints have been using single soldiers as decoys for the Beresaad to chase, I heard them bitching about it last week. Those guys who came through from Alam. Maybe the kids just thought it was about them."

"Maybe it's better to make the Beresaad angry than the Tevinters either way," someone else said. "Sorry, sorry. I know you're Qunari, so are half of us, you all think you need to do the right thing for your people. But you've got to admit, everything gets bad when someone crosses Tevinter. The Beresaad will take our food, maybe. We can fish. Tevinter will poison the well."

"Ugh," Hissrad said. "Well, doesn't look like we're doing anything with him right now. Don't agree though. Tevinter doesn't need to know."

"Tevinter finds things out. Just like the Qunari. There are spies, and they have agents up here if they blew up the bunker. And this one must have been with someone—can't have been all alone in the jungle. They don't understand that."

"We'll figure something out," Hissrad said.

"Yes. I suppose we'll have to. Well, Ataashi—"

Hissrad laughs. "Stupid damn name."

"The children like it."

"Yeah, yeah. Hey, Aran, I'll catch you later. I've got to go check on our problem."

The rattle of the screen.

"I assume," Dorian said, turning his head to see Hissrad making slightly undignified work of untangling one horn from a knot of beads, "that I was meant to hear that."

"Hear what?"

Dorian eyed him. "I'm injured, not stupid. You're a spy. You're playing games. Let me think that the village is against turning me over, when it's really your opinion that matters."

"Alright," Hissrad said, dropping to a crouch in front of Dorian, forearms to knees. "Have it your way. Gonna blow my cover?"

His brow was furrowed a little bit. He had very nice lips, which was rather unfortunate. There was an interesting scar stretching down to meet them on one side of his mouth, and it didn't help even slightly. He seemed quite unmarked otherwise, until you looked at his chest, which Dorian was frankly trying to avoid doing at all. It seemed unlikely that sex would get him out of this particular mess, had he even been capable of the athleticism required at that exact moment in time.

"Maybe I should, if they like me so much better than you do. There, let's have it out."

Hissrad grunted. "I can still drug you."

"You would have already," Dorian said, although he wasn't absolutely sure he was right. Bluff and double-bluff?

"Would I."

"You really are very worried about losing your cover story, aren't you?" Dorian asked, a little surprised to feel the pieces slotting together, the tension in Hissrad's voice twisting the facts just so. "Too worried to just haul me over your shoulder and keep going when you ran into someone from the village and they wanted to care for me. You're, what, the hunter everyone trusts? Soft on the children? But now I'm here you have no idea what to do with me."

"Shit's sake," Hissrad said.

"Oh, I'm right! You really don't have a plan."

Laughter didn't suit his ribs, but he couldn't help it. It turned into a coughing fit, and that hurt too. At least it cleared his lungs a bit.

So many possible complications from something as simple as fractured ribs, without magic on hand to deal with it.

A sobering enough thought.

His own magic had always been wretchedly useless for healing, even without the distraction of pain. It had annoyed his mother no end. Tell me, Dorian, darling—how exactly do you plan to survive the simplest assassination attempt?

Mostly by scaring everyone shitless, Mother. It seems to have worked so far.

Oh, simpler times. The version of Dorian who had been seventeen and unconcerned about the consequences of his actions was only a few years away, but also effectively dead. At least he'd enjoyed the process of ruining his life.

Hissrad watched him in silence until he was done coughing.

Dorian sighed, shrugged his good shoulder by way of apology.

"Fine," Hissrad said. "I don't have a plan. I don't see as you've got one either, so I guess we're even. You want to live, and I want to not get into shit with my bosses, and neither of us has a clue how we're gonna do it. That feel good?"

"Better than it felt when I thought I was the only one in over my head."

"Alright," Hissrad said. "If that's what does it for you. Up for a chat?"

"Oh, is it interrogation time already? I must have missed the bell."

"Sure, if you like. Interrogation. Got a couple of kids here in the village say you only came out of the trees and started running the other way into the deep jungle when you saw it wasn't just the Karataam near the bunker. Something about gesturing to them which way they should run themselves. Let's talk about that."

"Must we?"

"I mean, we could go with you knowing exactly what went down at the bunker, but that'd be a more painful talk."

Dorian tipped his head back to stare at the ceiling, which was much less unnerving than trying to look Hissrad in the face with his gaze as level and intent as it was just then. "What is there to say about it, apart from the fact that I have terrible judgement under pressure? I lost my unit last week and it's all been downhill since then."

"So that's actually what happened, then?"

"Which version?"

"The kids."

"Yes. I'm thinking a few more tricks like that and I can be a tragic martyr. Although there must be so many of those here that nobody will notice another, so that's a bit of a flaw. But this is the redemption section of the melodrama, you see—I did a fine job of the debauchery and disgrace part, so now the audience must have its honourable death."

"Lying and telling the truth at the same time's not bad," Hissrad said. "Be so full of shit it's hard to tell apart. You done this before?"

"Have you ever been in Minrathous?"

Silence. Dorian dropped his gaze and found Hissrad's eyes averted instead.

"Yeah," Hissrad said.

"Oh. Well—"

"Liked the dancers, I guess. There's a nice plaza, great big bell. Rest's a bit bloody. Nice to come back to Seheron."

Whatever it was that Hissrad had thought of, it was gone now. He was smirking a little bit, enjoying how Dorian squirmed.

Not unjustly, possibly, although that thought was in itself deeply annoying. Minrathous was its own particular kind of awful, but damned if Dorian wasn't meant to be the one to say so.

"Ah, yes. You returned to your country estate for the winter, as one does. A spot of boating and so on. Having sex with the neighbours in inappropriate places—no, sorry, that one was me, although if you're interested—wait a minute, you're just letting me talk to get a grip on me, aren't you."

Hissrad was silent.

"You're giving me a look," Dorian said. "I've been on the receiving end of a great many looks, don't think I can't tell. Go on, out with it." A flicker of a smirk of his own, just to prove to himself that he was capable of playing at levity.

"Hah," Hissrad said. Another beat of silence, the pause drawn out until Dorian thought Hissrad had nothing more to say. "You really are a pretty angry guy, aren't you?"

"And why, pray, would I not be?"

"Not right now," Hissrad said. "All the time."

"Yes, all the time," Dorian snapped. "You can have the story for free if you want it—I can't imagine what good it would possibly do you. My darkest secrets, known to only around nine tenths of the Imperium."

Hissrad gestured for him to continue, open palmed, almost like he was offering Dorian his hand for the next dance.

Wouldn't that be something for Minrathous to talk about.

"You were right, I was an Altus—perhaps still am, I'm not sure if I'm formally disowned yet or not. News doesn't travel very well out here. In any case, I'm uninterested in sex with women, very much enjoy sex with men, and very much didn't enjoy the idea of hiding either of those facts. Rather shocking."

"Tevinter is so fucking weird." Hissrad settled himself properly down onto the floor, rather the way he'd been sitting when Dorian first woke up. It didn't quite bring them eye to eye, despite the fact that Dorian was sitting on the thin pallet.

"Mm. In places. Anyway, that's the story of why I was conscripted into the army, more or less."

"Huh."

"What?"

"Tevinter army doesn't conscript. Runs on slaves and sadistic assholes."

Dorian sighed. "And now you're wondering what sort of terrible spy or whatever I am, not even knowing how the military really works? I promise you, it's really more a case of my managing to be an exception in everything I do. I'm very good at that. I suppose conscripted is the wrong word. They certainly didn't want me. Ordered by the higher powers, anyway. It turns out that if you just fuck enough of the wrong people in creative enough ways, anything is possible. And it was rather more than the family name could take, so no help there."

His chest was hurting rather more now from talking so much, but he'd never been good at stopping.

"It's Pavus, by the way," he added, when Hissrad didn't immediately fill the silence. "The family name. It's ruined already, so it won't give you much leverage. But you might as well call me Dorian."

"You were sent to the army," Hissrad said, "because you like fucking."

"Fucking men, if you please."

"No, wait." Hissrad rubbed his hand across his narrow chin. "You were sent to the army because you're some kind of romantic."

Dorian actually laughed again, helpless, although he very well knew what the painful result would be. The wheezing took some time to stop. "Do you actually know what that word means? Do Qunari do romance? Because the last time I checked, sleeping with two thirds of the fine professionals in a brothel and being dragged out by the templars isn't typically included in the definition. I did sleep with some of the templars too, if you must know."

"I know about romance," Hissrad said. "We don't do it. I can read. Don't know if you knew that, but we can do research."

"On romance."

Hissrad shrugged.

"You're a very strange Qunari," Dorian said.

"Sure."

"I think I need to lie down again." A tired line which really just slipped out, the tone of it vaguely humiliating. "Wash, possibly."

"Sure."

Bizarrely, Hissrad helped him with it. The whole process of making oneself clean, strange in its intimacy, the trust placed in mistrusted hands. Changing one's rather tattered uniform for a light robe. A relief.

He was too tired and sore to protest it, for all he couldn't begin to understand it. But there it was. In truth, he hadn't been so clean in over a week, and it was hard mind that.

No sleep, not for some hours. The pain pulled him back from the edge again and again so that he drifted and woke in waves.

It was late when Hissrad came over to him, a great shadow in the moonlight that striped the floor.

"Here," he said.

A potion. For the pain.

"And am I to be drugged as well?"

Hissrad was silent.

In silence, too, Dorian took the small bottle.

"Get some sleep, Dorian," Hissrad said.

The children were there when he woke up, and Hissrad was a silent, watchful figure in the corner.

"Is this a test?" Dorian mumbled, and tried to sit up, but found that the potion had worn off rather.

The children looked confused—glanced to Hissrad, who shrugged.

"Thanks," one of them said. The older boy, perhaps twelve, skin dark and freckled and eyes nearly black. "We shouldn't have been there, and you covered for us, and we're very grateful."

The tone of a memorised series of phrases, which took Dorian back rather. Yes sir, I'm very sorry I broke your son's nose, I won't do it again.

He smiled. "Yes, I'm sure."

"You look like shit," the other said, the girl, hair in a knot that was trying to escape.

"Somebody tried to manhandle me," Dorian said, turning his eyes to Hissrad, who pulled an unimpressed face.

"Ashkaari," the girl said, very seriously, "that was bad of you."

"Yup," Hissrad agreed. "I'm no good."

"Bring back fruit next time," the girl said, "and maybe I'll forgive you."

This seemed to cover the entirety of the conversation they'd prepared, and so they departed.

"Goodness," Dorian said, when they'd been gone for a few minutes and nobody seemed to be moving anywhere near the hut. "That was all very wholesome."

"Welcome to my damn life," Hissrad said, a note of genuine feeling to the words.

"Hah! Is it difficult to spy when the children keep on being children at you? Who are you spying on, anyway? Their parents?"

"Quit it," Hissrad said. "Think I liked you better when you were asleep."

"Ah, no altruism to giving me pain relief, I see."

Dorian had in fact slept better than he could remember doing—better than he'd slept any night since his patrol ran into Fog Warriors and then Qunari in quick succession, certainly, but also better than he'd slept in a tent surrounded by the kind of arseholes who thought the way that Tevinter went about fighting over Seheron seemed entirely reasonable. Not trust for Hissrad—only the exhaustion that pain produced. And still.

Hissrad laughed. "What do you think?"

His face was hard to see in the shadows, the light blinding where it fell across Dorian's side of the space.

"I think you still don't know what you're doing."

"Hey," Hissrad said, "you try doing four jobs at once because your bosses think one agent is enough for a quarter of the island."

"Good grief," Dorian said.

"This isn't even my damn station," Hissrad said. "Yeah, go on, laugh. I keep order in Seheron. Not that urban fighting's any fun, but I just know someone's fucking it up while I'm gone. My guys are good, but give them a shitty leader—ugh."

"Very communicative of you."

"Yeah, like you said about your name. Not gonna give you much leverage. You want tea? It's shit."

"How can I resist a proposition like that? Very well. Bring me your worst tea, and perhaps something disgusting to eat while you're at it."

"Food's pretty good today actually." Hissrad heaved himself to his feet. "Probably won't live down to your standards."

"I'll live somehow." Dorian stretched, cautious—testing the limits of pain-free movement and finding them unsatisfactory. "Well, unless you turn me over to your oh so delightful superiors."

Perhaps one was in fact dead and only waiting for life to catch up with the idea.

Perhaps one had been dead for months and only waiting for life to catch up with the idea. The unreality of his life in the army. The terrified, explosive monotony. The hatred, hatred, hatred—

A spirit coaxed into a body was reluctant to leave it.

Hissrad brought him tea, and a bowl of food. The tea was indeed atrocious, and bitter; the food rather good, well-spiced.

"I take it," Dorian said, "that you've told them all that I'm far too potentially dangerous to come and see, and that the children were only to so much as look at me with your supervision, and then you can claim that I was evil all along when you decide to turn me in."

"You figure?"

"It's how the Imperium would do it. All very convenient, if someone you dislike turns out to be a maleficar."

"You're a necromancer," Hissrad said. Sat himself down much closer to Dorian this time, although his expression remained inscrutable. "Pretty sure they wouldn't like that. Maybe it's as much for your own good as my convenience."

"You've met a lot of necromancy, I take it," Dorian said. "It didn't seem to bother you, at any rate. Odd, though—hardly a very popular field for battlemages when blood is in such abundant supply."

"Not much," Hissrad said, although to which part Dorian wasn't sure—and then said nothing more until they'd finished eating.

Evening, the air cooling pleasantly with the breeze from the sea. Here, looking west, the sun turned the sea to gold. Dorian sat in the shadows right by the door and watched the village move past, silhouetted against sea and sky, a slanted cross-section of life—the nets carried down to the boats, the clothes beaten ready to be washed. Someone sang out of sight, behind a building perhaps. Hissrad has been gone for the day, and perhaps that meant that Dorian would be out of time soon—but how was one to run when walking was painful?

Three men from the village and a woman were hanging around outside, pretending they weren't standing watch over him, and he really didn't have the stomach to fight them.

Oh, very well. The truth: he didn't quite think Hissrad was going to hand him over.

Not yet. Not while Dorian was still annoying him, intriguing him. Hissrad watched him so carefully, catalogued every word he said—give that up? Surely not.

Wishful thinking, Pavus. You're not that interesting.

When Hissrad returned it was with a respectable number of recently deceased small forest animals slung over his shoulder, roped together by the feet. Shouts of delight, laughter. Hissrad's voice, more heavily accented when he was speaking to people other than Dorian.

Who was he, Hissrad? Did anybody know? He had a mask he wore for Dorian, and another for the village—how many more?

"You're looking better," Hissrad said, ducking inside with a bucket of water. "Uh—not good, but you know."

"Sore and bored witless, thank you," Dorian said. "Do you know, when I wasn't fighting people I used to be very good at research. I'm not sure I'd know which way up to hold a book if you showed me one this minute. The army has quite beaten it out of me. All this intellectual curiosity and such makes for very poor soldiers, I suppose, particularly when you're expected to do—you know."

"Yeah," Hissrad said. "Don't believe you, though. Guy like you? Pretty sure nobody ever managed to beat much of anything out of you."

He poured out water into his basin, and began the slow work of stripping off his vitaar, the jungle-camouflage grey-green of it running down his forearms, dripping on the floor, although he wiped it up again quickly, splashed clean water from the bucket onto the places it had landed. The way his body revealed itself was fascinating, the curves of it changing as the lines slipped away. A different definition to the heavy muscles of his shoulders.

"No," Dorian said, and didn't trouble with trying to sound anything less than proud. "They very much did not. But all the same, I haven't touched a book in a year."

"I've got plenty," Hissrad said. "They like it if we read. Sanctioned texts. Few unsanctioned ones, for people like me. Know the enemy."

"Ah yes, your cutting-edge research on the mating habits of the common human."

"Hey," Hissrad said, "don't knock it. You never read books about Qunari?"

"Only the pornographic, thank you."

"Being pinned down and conquered by some great savage beast."

"Oh, yes."

"How're you enjoying the savagery?"

"It could use some work." Dorian reached out to touch the wall, grasped at the panels of it, levered himself carefully upright. He barely reached Hissrad's shoulder.

Hissrad's arm under his elbow steadied him.

"A lot of work," Dorian corrected. "You were off to such a good start in the jungle. Throwing me violently to the ground. The boot on my staff was a masterstroke."

"You're such an asshole," Hissrad said, but he was smiling, oddly open, quickly shuttered.

"Yes. Well. I am from Tevinter. Don't you have cautionary pamphlets about people like me?"

"About five hundred," Hissrad said.

"Ah, fewer than have been published in Minrathous alone about me in particular."

Hissrad looked down at him. That stillness he was capable of, his gaze holding so very steady.

"Yes, I know," Dorian said. "I'm a show-off."

"Kinda," Hissrad said. "Kinda weird, for an Altus. Not the showing off, I mean. Everything else."

"Believe me," Dorian said, "I've been told that one too."

He expected, looking up at Hissrad—hoped—to find the anger that had carried him through two years of military service, of running, of being dragged back, of the insistence on order, order, discipline, order—sitting on the boat to Seheron while the men beside him laughed about Qunari stupidity as though any Imperial power had grown that way without knowing exactly what it was doing—the orders, so many orders—

He had been so angry, for so long, that it ought to have come naturally.

He just felt tired.

"I should have you shave me, if we're busy putting our lives in each other's hands," Dorian said. "Wouldn't that be fun?"

Two days had passed, and Hissrad's cover remained intact, and Dorian, although theoretically recovered enough from his initial pained exhaustion to burn down the entire village if he liked, remained undrugged and unrestrained.

His ribs had bruised spectacularly, mottled almost black. His shoulder felt as though it had done the same, although he couldn't check—could barely move it, really.

The resulting beard would have been fine if he could grow a reasonable one, but he knew very well that full facial hair wasn't his strong point. Also, it itched.

"What, you into that?" Hissrad asked. He was sitting on the other side of the hut which had turned out to be his own quarters, angled half away from Dorian, hands busy with lengths of rope in different weights, checking their lengths, cutting them, making them into surprisingly neat little twists. Coils of wire, too, and knives to be sharpened. Skinning and butchery and so on, one must assume, to go with the cover story.

"I'm into not looking like the world's youngest and most unconvincing hermit."

"You really don't give a shit, do you? But hey, if you're serious, I can do that." In profile, Hissrad's face gave another impression, oddly soft. And then he looked across at one, and one remembered how intense he could be.

"Ah, yes. That is the game we're playing, isn't it."

"Game?"

"Mm. Well, are you going to shave me or not? You seem to have enough blades on your person, I'm sure one of them must be suited."

There was a certain pleasure to be found in just being entirely beyond caring, Dorian had discovered—in this, Hissrad certainly was right. One might die at any moment even if one was entirely careful. Seheron didn't care very much for anyone's attempts to protect themselves. Tevinter was also very much not interested in seeing Dorian return alive, as far as he could tell. If he was being entirely honest, he didn't feel much more in danger here than he sometimes did in the barracks. He had never wanted to die, it wasn't that, but—

Hissrad got up and left, no word. But when he came back it was with water and a small piece of soap.

"Come here," he said.

It jolted sharply through Dorian, that little bit of fear, the bit of disbelief, am I really going to—?

He was really going to.

Going to sit on the floor with Hissrad behind him. Going to let Hissrad tilt his head back so that it lay against Hissrad's shoulder.

Hissrad's hand on his neck, on his jaw, was gentle—the way it took Dorian's breath to be found in suggestion only.

"What game are we playing?" Hissrad murmured, right into Dorian's ear.

"Interrogation time again already?"

Hissrad ignored this. "Hold still. Don't want to cut you."

The first stroke of the blade, smooth as a lover—as Dorian had imagined a lover, rather than the many and varied casual fucks he'd had.

"The game," Dorian said, "where you're kind to me, flirt with me—let me think that perhaps after all you could care for me, although you have no reason to and a great deal of reason to hate me—give me what I want, you know, until I forget what you are—"

Hissrad's hand was firmer now, fingers pressing into his jaw to tilt his head in another direction. He said nothing.

"Well," Dorian said, eyes closed because he couldn't see Hissrad's face even from the side and say it, "there are worse ways to win yourself a spy in the Tevinter military headquarters than seduction, aren't there? Maker knows you'll get nothing else useful from me."

"So that's what you want, huh?" Hissrad asked. "Someone to love you. Going back on not being a romantic now?"

"For fuck's sake," Dorian said.

Anyone could see that he wanted sex—his body was showing that off well enough, his breath taking on the slight unsteady tremor of desire as the razor slid across his skin, Hissrad's fingers following it, feeling for unevenness. Sex and death twined together, a skin-thin barrier between them. Nothing wrong there—he'd both built and ruined a reputation by fucking the wrong people.

On recklessness, too.

But love—

"That's not a no," Hissrad said.

"No," Dorian said. "I don't want someone to love me."

"Sometimes you lie really well," Hissrad said. "And sometimes you're shit at it."

Dorian leaned back against him, feeling the radiating warmth of him, his broad chest bare as ever. Infuriating. "You aren't going to be my lover—you said it yourself, you don't do romance. And I'm not going to be your spy in exchange for a game where we pretend to care for one another. We're enemies."

Hissrad's fingers came to rest beneath Dorian's chin—pressed lightly into the line of his throat.

"How do you see this going down, then?"

"I let you keep your cover," Dorian said. "You do whatever it is you do, root out the evil corrupting influence of Tevinter or whatever it is this time, and I'm silent, and you let me go on my way, safe in the knowledge that all I could tell you about the army is that it very much dislikes my backtalk."

"Let a mage walk free, huh?"

"Yes. I wouldn't worry, I hear anyone who survives long here does it by blood magic and that's very much not my style."

"Easy to say now."

"Indeed. But all the same. You don't believe I'm close to bleeding the innocent. You helped me recover when you claimed you'd make me bargain for it. You don't fool me."

"Maybe I've got a trick on hand for dealing with you."

"Maybe," Dorian agreed. "Maybe you're just terrible at letting people suffer right in front of you. It's not a good trait in a spy, by the way, you should get that looked at."

"Hey, you want me to start on the ways you're not a good soldier?"

"Please," Dorian said. "Write a list. I'll give it to my commander. I'm sorry, sir, I can't go on patrol today, I have a paper here—"

"Asshole," Hissrad said easily, and turned Dorian's head the other way to finish his work, leaving Dorian's freshly shaven cheek turned against Hissrad's shoulder.

Hissrad seemed to be enjoying the experience. A little, nothing terribly condemning, not as much as Dorian, Dorian who could feel his pulse thudding under Hissrad's hands, whose body was laughably easy to interest, who felt each stroke of the razor as a thrill in the pit of the stomach—but still, with the way they were pressed together, one noticed.

"There," Hissrad said, and wiped Dorian's unmasked face down with a cloth, and Dorian, still thinking about sex, was hard pressed not to laugh at the strange parody of it. Would it have been so bad to laugh? Well, no, if one could have done it without any hint of hysteria.

Hissrad's hand fell to Dorian's waist, ghosted across his stomach, low enough that Dorian thought for a dizzy moment—

Hissrad huffed a heavy breath out through his nose and, leaning Dorian carefully forward and away, clambered to his feet.

"Don't worry about it," he said. "I don't fuck people if it's not their role. Got Tamassrans for that. No seduction."

"Another Qunari thing, I suppose," Dorian said. Sighed. He still felt shaky, unsteady, too aware of his body—not in the purely macabre way born of battle or flight, but in the old way, half-forgotten, vital. No need to move, at least. One could reasonably sit, gathering one's strength to negotiate moving one's injured body. One could allow oneself time for it to pass.

"Yeah. You need to fuck someone, they're there to fix you up. Nice and regulated. Like healers."

"And you've never fucked someone in the interests of work?"

One of Hissrad's practiced silences.

"You have," Dorian said, with a flash of victorious feeling which was quickly followed by an indefinable sense of guilt.

"Special circumstances," Hissrad said. "Don't make a habit of it."

"Just as well, really." Dorian turned his head, smiled up at Hissrad. "Messy business. I should know. Not the work part, I suppose. Not from that side, at least. I do know a few things about sex with someone looking for political leverage. Never tried it, myself."

"Because you're a romantic," Hissrad said.

"Well, you don't need to sound so smug about it." Nettled, still, by Hissrad. Forever, probably. How ridiculous.

A sharp jolt into consciousness. The pitch black of a heavily clouded night. Oh Seheron, one's body quickly learnt the language of danger—the sudden silences where a noise should be, the breathless quality of the night. The wrong kind of movement, perhaps something creaking softly, footfalls that came too slowly.

Hissrad stood in the doorway, a slightly darker shade of black, barely visible but growing slowly clearer—

Fog was rolling in, not from the sea but from the jungle, catching the small fragments of light that slipped through thin spots in the cloud, that spilled from a lantern left burning outside a house—gathering them to itself so that it glowed softly from within.

"Hissrad," Dorian whispered, and saw the way Hissrad's head turned very slightly in the shift of his horns—not entirely, not so that HIssrad faced away from the door. An ear for his words only.

"They don't care about the village," Hissrad said, just as quiet. "It's alright. They don't fuck with civilians. Don't sweat it."

So they were here for Hissrad, or for Dorian. For some unknown agent in the village, perhaps. For something hidden.

"There's black powder in the sheds by the water," Hissrad said. "It's for your guys. That's why Aran didn't want to hand you over to the Beresaad. In case you knew. My job's to make sure nobody gets hold of it and uses it. That pass your standards?"

"The children—"

"Nah, not them. Your guys dropped the barrels off themselves. Took them and blew the bunkers up to cover it. Village probably didn't have a damn choice about taking the stuff. Guess the Tevinter army will be through some time soon looking to collect."

Silence. Hissrad's slow breaths.

He could move the screen silently after all. Getting his horn stuck in it, clattering around with it, all those times he let Dorian know he was coming—for the love of—

The mist swallowed him quickly.

Stay put, Dorian told himself. Stay put, damn you. For once in your life, make the sensible choice. You won't be able to see for shit. You won't be able to do anything.

But they might very well come for him anyway, if it was Tevinter they moved against—

He levered himself upright.

If he was going to die in bed it was damn well going to be under better circumstances.

He slipped out into the fog, open and enclosed at once. The sheds had been to the right, barely visible through the doorway and some distance away, beyond the limits of the village.

He oriented himself carefully. A straight line was the thing. A clear line of sight meant that if he just held his course, he would find his way.

His chest ached, not with the sharpness of those first days but deep and persistent.

No staff, and a barely functional right arm—oh well.

He felt an odd sense of inevitability to the moment, as though he'd been through it before—a trick of the mind, only, but a persistent one.

One foot in front of the other. Fifty paces should have taken him clear of the houses. He stopped there, breathing in the humid air.

No good summoning a spirit-light in the fog, he'd learnt that the hard way, the incident very nearly fatal. He thought instead about fire, a broad low thought, embers in the hearth, a fire creeping under the moss of the forest floor waiting to burst free, the slow creep of molten rock; he spread the thought in front of him, wide and weak, a flash of heat and light only, enough to burn a portion the moisture from the air for perhaps as much as half a heartbeat—

Crouching, cast.

A quick flash of visibility, shadows, Hissrad's great bulk, axe in hand, about to charge blindly or guided by some clue beyond Dorian's senses—the sheds, distant—two figures beside them, and one, he thought, he thought—

One, he thought, was drawing a bow.

All of them frozen in surprise, taken unawares by the heat and the light.

The fog fell again.

They would shoot Hissrad, or they would shoot him, and nobody would see a thing, and—

Hissrad grunted in pain, that familiar sound of air expelled involuntarily through gritted teeth. A heavy footfall as he fell back a pace. If they had shot him once, found their mark even though the confusion, then the next shot—if the first hadn't been—would surely be fatal—and damn his idiot heart, tricked by proximity and a little kindness—damn it, but the thought hurt.

Another fifty paces to the sheds. Just there, there, that must be the angle, if he could only find the right distance, it would have to be now, this second—

Dorian reached for lightning.

It burnt his hand when he brought it down, the jolt of it violent, sparking up his forearm, spiraling almost to the shoulder, a branching forked thing, the price of desperation—

But it found its true mark too, striking violently down—

And everything was blinding light.

The fog burned golden-red, faded in the radiating heat, revealed Hissrad, kneeling—arrow in his shoulder, where a Qunari warrior's armour would usually sit.

Dorian's breath came in painful gasps.

"What the shit," Hissrad said. "What the actual shit—"

Nobody else was left standing in the space between the inferno of the sheds and Hissrad's hunched form.

The restless tension of stillness had burnt from Dorian's body, cut through by lightening, the sharp new pain of it—red lines raised on his arm, searing and feather-fine.

He felt something strangely like peace. When had he ever felt anything of the sort?

"Don't worry about it," Dorian said, although his voice was less certain than he'd hoped—shook a little, between the pain and the desperate terrified rush of the moment. He walked slowly over to Hissrad, the ground damp and uneven under his feet. Stood before him, looked down at him, at the crumpled quality of his brow, the pain that tightened the line of his mouth. "You mustn't underestimate how willing my commanders are to blame me for everything that goes wrong. I should think the village will be fine."

People were coming out of the houses, cautious and armed—blinking in the pyre-light of the sheds.

"You should go," Hissrad said. His eyes were closed, and his breathing was too controlled.

"Just like that?"

"Yeah. Dunno if it's a favour really. But you should go."

"I—" Dorian swallowed. "Yes."

"Maybe get off the island," Hissrad said. "You can't cut it."

"I'm not sure that anyone can."

Hissrad grunted.

"I'll go," Dorian said.

Hesitated.

Bent, against the protest of his ribs, to kiss Hissrad gently between the horns. The benediction of a Chantry brother, say—

Oh, a fine joke.

Hissrad didn't open his eyes, but the lids fluttered strangely.

Dorian turned, without another word, and left.

One foot in front of the other, an unreal movement, barely comprehensible—that one could simply walk—that this was the whole of it, done. That he had only the censure of the army ahead of him.

Perhaps the anger would be back soon. It would have to be.

He had always needed it.