Nasrin/Vivienne thoughts 1 (1,200 words)
Nasrin itched. The air felt wrong on her face.
Val Royeaux was gaudy and loud and she was used to despising it from her own home. The capital that taxed and mocked and still came to her doors every month to ask for a discount on their finery. Her seneschal was from the capital. When she was sixteen (and eighteen, and thirty-two) she would laugh in his face and retreat her woods, dogs at her heels and arm outstretched for Gyre, the best falcon she’d ever owned.
(”Talk to my cousin about the envoys, Oscar. You know he’ll agree with you the way you like.”
“But, your grace—
—Hush.”)
She’d take her birds and her dog and the forest was open to her—the Apple Woods and the Greatwoods and all the clearings that no one had thought to name. The capital, she thought, could laugh all they wanted.
Standing there now, bare faced and the air sticky on the shorn back of her neck, her jaw ached from clenching. The old cleric still mocked her from her knees, not knowing that Nasrin was a breath away from telling her that no, she did not murder the Divine, but she might, if she’d actually seen the woman.
(Serault. Glittering and grand for the Divine’s feast. Emeralds warmed to blood temperature against her skin. The new mask was gold, lined-soft and easy on her face. She barely felt it. Her dress was lovely and almost right for her, a silken snatch of forest that pooled as she sank into a curtsy before the Lord of the Wood.
“My lord,” she’d said. “You honour us. But..may I see the Divine’s gift, before you present it?”
It’s taken too much work to get her here.
She might have cried when he struck her. Shock more than pain as attendants ran forward to trip over tables that suddenly remembered they’d been alive, the legs sprouting and tangling into a screen full of thorns that did not match the plants from which they grew.
When he spoke, Nasrin felt it in her gut and her hamstrings. Her throat. The back of her neck. All fear places. Prey places. His shape flickered, stag to man, and halfway between. His eyes, once liquid black, were filmed over. Blood was caked at the corners.
“No trust, huntress?” he said. “Enjoy your party. The woods are barred to you.”)
The crowd pushed in, trampling her thoughts and calling her herald or fraud by turns.
Not huntress, though she listened for it. Half hope and solid dread.
(Her Gyre was dead, and she was glad of it. Old age, the year before the Divine’s visit.
When the lord left, her dogs tried to tear out her throat.)
Now, she stared at the message in her hand. The paper was thick and near-smooth and weighted with seals.
A small party, my dear…
“I’m not going.”
Cassandra winced. “We need all the allies we can find,” she said. Heavy tact through gritted teeth.
“I—” Nasrin swallowed. “I am not good at parties.”
“That, I can sympathise with, herald,” Cassandra said. “But they chase after you. Haven’t you noticed?”
“I—” I’ll be recognised. I’ll be a laughing stock. I don’t, I can’t —”I’m not wearing a dress.”
Cassandra’s smile was almost worth the discomfort and her useless tongue, the noise of the city fading as Nasrin felt the other woman’s full attention. “And that,” she said, “Is something I can back you up on.”
“I know you.”
The words came in a quiet moment, the ice of Madame de Fer’s welcoming display still puddling in the front hall. The woman herself had them closeted in a small balcony. Nasrin’s hands fisted in her shirt while the first enchanter of Montsimmard leaned over the smooth stone railing.
Vivnenne’s mask shone silver as she smiled.
“You never traveled to Serault,” Nasrin said. Blunt words and the hope of a quick escape.
Nasrin watched the other woman’s nose wrinkle, just a little, and sighed. She was bare and lead-mouthed. Tired and out of practice. “The estate,” she admitted, “Would have shone for your visit.”
The scene flowered in her mind. There would be a frenzy of preparation. A world of polishing and setting and Oscar threatening to give his notice, all so that glass spilling glory all over her house. Any visitor could forget the travel and the chill, when faced with the mix of fragility and wrought iron that made Serault stunning.
Nasrin would have grumbled at the fuss. She’d have sworn and broken things and gotten in the way more than she didn’t. And that, too, would be worth something. The hours spent in the firs, the forest rich with dying life, her hand following childhood trail marks. And she’d come back, wash off the mud and pull out the leaves, to face this woman in something gilded and green, her head high as the mage took in their small centre.
Nasrin would have taken any judgment and thrown it back with a smile.
Now, she looked at Vivienne and wondered the other woman saw.
“What do you want?” Nasrin asked.
Half a smile. A huff of breath. “You’ve made plenty of foolish choices, my dear,” she said. “Leaving me out of all of this would be another one.”
“I don’t want your magic,” Nasrin snapped. “Some scholar you are, if you can’t think why.”
“Don’t be a coward, marquise.”
“I don’t own that title.”
“No?” Vivienne tilted her head, and Nasrin imaged a raised eyebrow behind the metal. “Which one?”
I will not squirm.
There were small moments of accord. Warmth and quiet pleasure whenever Nasrin stressed the full weight of her name as a counter to Sera’s teasing. Always Vivienne, never Viv or Vivi.
She did her best not to smirk when Varric calls Nasrin Duchess, and was surprised when the herald comes back to their dire, crumbling haven with old Circle texts wrapped carefully in cloth.
“I didn’t bleed on them,” she said, scuffing the dirt like a child. Vivienne resisted the urge to place fingers under chin, raise her so those remarkable eyes of hers would see Vivienne and the gratitude it was never quite right to express.
“The Circle values your efforts,” she said instead. It did. She did, and she would grow. There would be a library for these found treasures.
“You don’t ask for much,” Nasrin said. She did look up, then. Disheveled and rawboned and nothing like the portrait in an ill-favoured spot in Celene’s gallery of nobles. There were dreadful circles under her eyes. Her lips were chapped and there was no gold in her hair. Only split ends and threads of grey.
Bastien, she thought. You would laugh.
“Whatever do you mean, my dear?”
“You ask for books,” Nasrin said, shrugging. “Cassandra and Dorian have me murdering people who know how to rip out my spine and make me wear it as a necklace. Varric has me dancing all over the continent destroying red lyrium that sings off key and might make me go mad, and Solas can’t sense an elven artifact that isn’t two inches from a ledge that leads to a splintery death. The Iron Bull has me chasing dragons. Books? Much safer.”
Vivienne covered her laugh with a hand. “That, herald, is because you haven’t read them.”
