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‘Apparently I’m fetching his lordship a drink.’
‘Oh, the irony,’ Tallis said, flatly, ‘when that’s usually the elf’s role. A role you play surprisingly well, Hawke.’
Garrett let himself smile at her. It was easier than any other expression, than the annoyance that her ploys and plans and plots failed to consider that most people had their own agendas which would not align with hers. The single-mindedness of extremis turned to stupidity. He also let her tip her poison into the goblet despite his disgust, their motions moving them through the swell of music and conversation, then apart at that door, floating in return and in his solitude to where Cyril de Montfort was waiting for his private drink and lap-dance with the Champion.
In the dim, stone-smelling cool, littered with light fragmented through those Orlesian worked-glass windows, Cyril took the proffered cup, only the quirk of an eyebrow when Garrett did not release the stem.
‘You only asked for one. But I find myself with a thirst. Is this Orlesian hospitality, my lord, to make a guest fetch and beg?’
‘Please,’ Cyril said, ‘there is no need for such formality. For but one fork in a road long past, I consider you and I would have grown to become men together, side by side, and close as brothers.’
‘Just one fork,’ Garrett said, smiling, smiling, Carver briefly and blandly in that nowhere-place in his mind, and Cyril’s face and surprisingly firm jawline blurred to pale nothing, ‘ah, but for that one fork my mother valued more than all else she could have had and held.’
Finally, a pause in Cyril's confidence he would always have what he wanted, he with his rack of many silver spoons.
‘Champion,’ Cyril said softly, ‘do not beg me. Will you share my cup?’
A pretence of surprise to find Cyril’s warm, firm fingers atop his own, curled around the goblet’s stem, the drugged wine within.
‘That depends. Will you share a story of our mothers?’
*
Carver managed to set aside the brooding during their day and night of haul, but back at the Hanged Man, the mood invariably settled in for the long run, souring what could have been relief. Garrett had become accustomed to his brother’s bitterness, but this time the mood was pointed in his direction more overtly than usual.
He detached from Isabela, from Varric, and sat heavily beside his brother, weight into the motion and resting thigh to thigh, and drank his brother’s drink. Drained to the dregs, thick with float as they were.
To the point. ‘Still thinking about that de Montfort class act?’
‘Andraste help that poor family,’ Carver minced in mimicry, lip curling. ‘Maker, brother. They can’t even be honest to themselves.’
Except letters usually had an audience, brother. ‘I wonder who she might have written to with such specificity. That’s what I contemplate, for someone to have found and tucked that scrap into Mother's family crest.’
The flash of their lanterns chasing along the lines of clawed birds grasping each other as they looked at the crest on the wall, redder than blood, folded wings in graven metal never to fly.
‘Don't know who, and I don't bloody care, but I’d bet all our expedition funds so far it was Gamlen who put it there.’ Carver, scowling into the empty mug, the sidelong annoyance at Garrett for taking what remained. Knee knocking against knee, but only by mistake, the thick muscle of his brother’s thigh hot and hard even through the paired scavenged leathers they wore. ‘He probably thought it was some great symbolic fuck you, risking his life crawling back into that slaver den. Such a short and sordid story to describe the Amell fall from grace.’
The scrap had resurrected parts of Garrett he thought he’d long since let go in his years in the Hinterlands with the Irregulars. He sat on his bunk in that shared room where Hawke brothers and sons slept, clawing at him through times when the household slept. The bare hint of coal-light was insufficient to read, the mabari’s eyes a low gleam in the corner, and it took calling a glyph to his fingertips to find those words again, reading while Asher’s rasping breath filled the room. This rattle and cloy in the baby’s lungs that simply would not clear in Lowtown’s forge-burned air, no matter Anders' efforts.
But he’d never been good at letting go. Everything went onto a shelf, waiting to find a use. Garrett shelved the questions he’d ask the spectre of Amelie de Montfort as swiftly as he thought of them, the sense he’d never been able to draw from heart of Mother’s tangled, thorny narrative. So, my lady, the Amells were once the Viscount’s direct competition, is that correct? And scandal struck the family right at the time we should have ascended to the Viscount’s throne. Carried there aloft, as it were, in the arms of a most-supportive Templar Order?
‘What struck me,’ Garrett said, ‘was that all this time, I thought it was Father’s blood to blame. But it seems I take more after Mother.’
Bluntly, abruptly, which meant with Carver most honestly: 'What do you think cousin Damion was smuggling?’
Ah. Yes, Lady de Montfort. How about that question? What form of smuggling could cause such a scandal as to bankrupt the Amells in their efforts to silence even rumour?
‘Where lies the deficit and where the surplus. In a city that forms the gateway to trade, north to south, east to west, what trade needs must occur in the city’s shadow.'
‘You know enough about the Council of Five that they wouldn’t have taken on a debt with Fausten Amell if there wasn’t some pre-existing relationship.’
‘Yes, I do know. And now you know. Well done, brother, for your concise deductive reasoning.’
‘So it’s to be a family of slavers, scoundrels and mages,’ Carver said, ‘this is our real birthright.’
There it was, Carver. There it was.
‘Goodness me. Do you think Father knew what he was marrying into? The poor naïve Circle mage he was, duped by a pretty face.’
‘How can you still find this amusing? We can blame Uncle Gamlen for what he did, but what he did was burn that money. At least he didn’t keep bloody making more, if that was how we got rich.’
Not the lost wealth left to Leandra and stolen by her wastrel brother who was, at some state of being within him, still too good a man to make money through the ways and means the Amells had once leveraged. Let the bloody coin slip through your fingers, uncle, in your guilt, as fast as you could be rid of the slippery, soiled stuff, wallow instead in the clean honest filth of your earned poverty and shame.
‘Brother, in a year under Athenril, our backs bent to the good service of this fine city, how can you still have doubts as to what colour money is? Wealth only exists if you take it off others. Living or dead.’
Just like power, little brother.
Carver’s expression smoothed, the petulant, childish bent lost and something new taking its place. A considering look, deep and smooth.
The eyes met Garrett’s, steady and calm, damp lips parted as if to impart an unforeseen wisdom.
The Templar Order’s backing, a level of wealth only possible to glean from the Tevinter trade-staple, and a clear run at the Viscount’s seat following Threnhold’s fuckery. Of course it had taken a concentrated attack from young Marlowe Dumar to bring a whole family down. An exposition of the magic strain in their blood the family had evidently kept concealed so well until Revka and her five children were hung out, sacrificed to the Circle; Garrett could not help but consider how deep he'd need to dig before unearthing a straight line link between Amell and Tevinter blood. Nor could he quite shelve the thought that Malcolm Hawke’s escape bid through a rich girl’s cunt might well have been sourced in a Dumar ploy. Would a Kirkwall Enchanter have had any knowledge of city politics to have wondered at the narrative around him?
Certainly no more than Leandra had, apparently. Or she never would have left. She might have put her bitter, twisted steel instead to seating her flawed brother upon that waiting that throne, then crafted her cage of blood and bone to keep him there.
‘Do you think Dumar will support Mother’s petition to return the family home?’
Let the smile become a grin. Drop the eyes. Maker, brother, oh Maker, oh Maker: and what steel would it take to put a brother like that on a throne, a brother without one drop of politics in his blood.
‘Not without the entire Templar Order backing her there, Carver.’
The child’s petulance returned at the loss of that something other, the consideration and calm Garrett had found momentarily fascinating adrift in uncertainty. ‘And still you find this funny.’
Introducing Carver Hawke: the only possible candidate remaining within the Amell bloodline who could take the Viscount’s throne.
At least until Asher Hawke reached his first flush of manhood. A test of whether the fragment of solid, magicless farmgirl blood Mother had conspired to introduce to their family could hold so staunch and true against the grasping, rending claws of Hawke and Amell.
‘It’s that or, well. You know. Kill myself.’
The chin lifted. ‘You took my drink. And I can’t be arsed looking at Corff again, once a night’s bloody well enough to cope with that face. Go get me another.’
Garrett stood and bowed, deep and formal. The flourish of his banded wrists, feeling, sudden and sharp, the ladder of scars beneath as raw as if fresh and chafing. ‘Your loyal cupbearer responds. Fetch and carry, brother.’
What else was there to be done, when Carver could not bring himself to truth.
*
‘--alas, I only heard the tale years later, Hawke, long after the gardens had been replanted. My mother would lower her voice just slightly, not out of shame, but habit, and say they did not speak of it again. But the way she should smile in that particular way of hers, when she told the telling. Now, as a man, I often contemplate that smile as one that suggested her piety and restraint was learned, and was not of her nature. "That was all,” she would insist. “Perfectly harmless.”
‘But she always lingered on the details, and that gave her away. The ink on the cuff that never quite came out, the music swelling just as they re-entered the manor. She told it like a curiosity, a trifle. I heard it as a confession.
‘And the telling gave me something more important than the story itself. That rules could be bent without catastrophe, that a life could pivot on moments so small they left no mark except to change that life entire. Certainly, her own moment changed me: a learning that composure is not a matter of innocence, but practice, and that beneath all the good breeding in the world, one might step into the light carrying deep secrets and find the world none the worse for those secrets that are held so close.’
They had stepped together during Cyril’s telling, near-swaying, the Orlesian's lilt thickening and softening, fluid and slipping into language lost. The movement had been contrived, first, but Garrett had found himself drifting into the image of Leandra as a girl amongst girls, white skirts belling as she ran through the night with her friend, laughing. Cyril was tall, firm, not soft; one who perhaps sparred and performed before crowds, in the way Orlesians did, who had a horse and led men into war. Perhaps he was a man who sometimes led those same men out; a skill Garrett had learned to look for in his mercenary days and respected more than the former. So they were pressed together now, and despite himself Garrett felt his heart settling into the necessary beat, his body ever responsive to the situations he would put it into, while Cyril spoke some charm into his ear, spiced breath curling against his neck. Both Cyril's hands clasped over his, over the goblet, which was the only thing carving some safe, neutral terrain between them.
When Garrett opened his eyes, that years-old spectre of Amelie de Montfort stood in the corner, eyes like flecks of coal, holding the scrap of her letter.
Garrett turned his head, brushed his beard against Cyril’s cheek, no pretence of distance now. Moved his leg forward, caught heat of Cyril's erection against the fine fabric, pressing through to his thigh. Cyril’s breath escaped, almost a moan.
He whispered it into the skin of the nobleman’s neck. ‘You have given me a gift greater than I had expected.’
‘Champion.’
‘And all I had to do was fetch you a drink.’ Ghosting along Cyril’s jawline, lips near to lips, his eyes closed to the spectre of Amelie de Montfort now vigorously practicing her penmanship, his free hand sliding along the outer seam of Cyril’s trews. The cold metal of the Chateau’s keyring caught on his littlest finger, the tug hidden by the press of his hand against Cyril's backside, turned intimate.
Cyril’s hesitation. ‘You will share it with me now.’
The lordling was hesitant at last, his arse cupped like that, by a man; perhaps now he finally wondered what sort of trophy a Champion might be, to be mounted or to do the mounting. That pause gave Garrett what was needed to step back and raise the goblet to his lips, brisk. A moment of insanity where he nearly drank, felt the drug calling to him, stinging through; what would his words be before Tallis' encompassing blackness took him? An assertion to Cyril that his incapacity was purposeful, that this was necessary, and that with his comatose body Cyril de Montfort could do as he wilt. A gift exchanged for the story.
It was a wild thought, unhinged, and in that moment felt exactly like Garrett imagined freedom might feel.
He threw the goblet down. Cyril did not flinch: notable. Met Cyril’s eyes in the clatter after, the drip.
Cool and steady. He knew what he could do with his face, his eyes, and let command settle over him like that mask. ‘Forgive me for spoiling the private party. You must be aware of my familiarity with the Qunari. I detected a trace of something in the smell of the wine, something of their sort.’
Cyril’s surprise swam through to mild anger, to bemusement, and something else entirely.
‘Here, Champion, at the Chateau? A Qunari poison in the wine.’
‘Qunari or Tal-Vashoth. I assume a man of your standing understands the difference. An alert would be ill advisable. Will you trust me to do my work?’
‘Is this – is this why you are here?’ With the barest edge of disdain, directed at others, ‘and not for my father’s petty hunt.’
Provoked by that, despite himself, Garrett leaned into it. His heart was still racing. His body had thought there would be a fuck; it couldn't catch up with his pivot of affairs. ‘Ah, fathers, mothers, Cyril. At some point, surely they merely become ghosts.’
‘What is a ghost but a memory, or a mark, on those still alive.’ Increasing certainty, and Cyril moved, marched to the wall with that military manner that notched up Garrett's alarm. A silken cord hung by the bed, loosely looped onto a hook. A bell call. Cyril reached. ‘I will test the spilled wine on a dog or a servant. The wine you fetched for me. And then I will know exactly how far to trust you in my father’s house.’
All that, Garrett thought, rueful, this rush of the force of lust turned to alternate motion, only to revert to violence again.
Still, despite himself, he caught Cyril’s body in the half-turn from his strike, lowering the young man to the bed. The jawline, which had been compelling for reasons unknown, suddenly struck him as familiar now it was upturned and adjacent the naked vulnerability of the neck, that pale neck with its flickering pulse.
‘Here you lie, brother, but for that fork of our mother’s.’