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The house is a smoky-taupe stucco that bakes itself in the heat of the midsummer Llomerryn sun, a birdhouse of a thing with a cut-glass square patch of yard balding in several places from misuse and a small lifetime of neglect. If you look between the blades of parched grass, you can see the pale, cracked earth underneath, like the skin of an elephant: it’s been a bad summer, all wilting haze and no rain, heavy with its own thick pulse. Dog days they’re called, under the Dog Star’s mercurial eye, bright as a flame in the dark; in the old days, there would have been sacrifices for this, incense, prayer and bells at dusk, blood spilled like hot iron down the throat of an angry, voracious god to quell the malaria-weather, the cholera-weather, the nothing-weather. Now, there are only humid prayers falling from humid mouths to add to the fever, drought caked dry through the clay like a bad fortune. There’s still incense if you want it, always is, but who’s burning in this heat unless you’re already for the pyres?
On these bleary mornings, Isabela will always wake with the sun in her eyes.
She’ll be up with the first of the doves, pinning her hair back loosely at the nape of her neck while the cobblestone is still cool and wreathed dim with last night’s shadows. From there, tilting her fourteen-year-old head in front of the copper-green mirror in her bedroom, she will walk to the market for bread and fish and cheese, if her mother wants it; if she can afford it, she will wander over to the fruit farmers, fresh and sun-bright from their orchards, and she will buy blackberries or peaches, drought-sour plums, a dark handful of grapes. If the fisherwoman from the north is there—twice a month, maybe—she will buy a single pomegranate, suspended like a lamp in her hand, ripe and private in its fullness, just for her to have and hold.
“Well! Hello to you, my early darling,” the fisherwoman will say, flashing her knifeblade grin. She’s only a few years older than Isabela but her fingers and palms are rough, scarred and thickened through with life and the ritual of harvest, the task of being fruitful. Isabela thinks she has the hands of child by comparison. “Done with the day’s toil already, are we? Did you come to ogle my swordfish? I did catch myself a fine boy just yesterday, ought to charge a good three sovereigns, I ought. Although,” she’ll say, leaning down close, full of conspiracy and whisper-soft wickedness, “for you, my bonny little lass, I’ll not charge you but half.”
And Isabela will laugh, because they both know it’s really a scrawny, bony thing she caught, that she cannot afford a whole swordfish half-price or not, and because it makes her feel a little older, a little wiser, this tight intimacy they barter with like grown women; the fisherwoman will sell her a pomegranate, charge her only a single copper, and Isabela will hide it away in her skirt pocket as she carries her basket back home, keeping to the coolness of the shadows on the stone, darkness into darkness.
Her feet will crush the dead brown grass into ashes; the house, already stifling by midmorning, will smell of balsam and sickly sweet myrrh, and she will smile at her mother, and she will make tea, and she will pretend, for an hour or two in her threadbare, impoverished life, that her mother smiles back at her without rancor, that there is not a basket on the mantel spelling out her worth in thick gold coins, that her bones are not laid out in heavy silver bars like a skeleton on the table, that she is her mother’s daughter and that means everything it should, that their smudged stucco walls are the borders they will both live for, kill for, die for. She will pour her mother a cup of tea. She will gorge herself on fantasies.
“The fisherwoman caught a swordfish yesterday,” she will tell her mother. “A big one. Must be the first anyone’s had in weeks.”
And her mother will say nothing. Her mother can go days at a time without speaking to her, and has often done.
Isabela pretends she says, Tell me about it, girl. Was it as big as you, my pretty lass?
She pretends she answers, Not by half, Mama, but she’s not charging much. Not for me.
Well, her mother will say, go on, then. Buy it right out of her hands. We’ll invite her for dinner and salt the rest. Wait, wait, I’ll go with you, we can stop at the dressmaker’s, you’re shooting right out of your bootlaces again, my little girl.
But at night, under the sway of the summer stars, she will crack open the pomegranate she has hidden in her skirt and bite into a mouthful, each kernel teeming with life, their blood filling her mouth like a secret. The Dog Star, far up above, will flicker over her in its listless shift to autumn, to her wedding, to her death, she the heiress of its summer agony; she will fall asleep outside in the dead, shriveled grass, homeless in her own backyard, motherless for all her life, a straw kite on a windless day wanting nothing but a murmur of breeze to wrap her up and lift her away.
—
Antiva fits her mouth like a glass of cabernet, a loud gush of flavor bursting on her tongue in bright-hot floods of sound and color and light. In Antiva, Isabela thrives, expansive as smoke in the crowded streets; in Antiva, Isabela learns to occupy space. She learns to live.
“Isabela,” Zevran Arainai admonishes when she wakes up at half ten, “you’ve missed breakfast and the bi-weekly assassination. My dear, but is that any way to start the day?”
“Mm,” she sighs, sulky-sultry, stretching her arms up over her head, easy with the flush of her own skin in a way she never thought she would be. “There’s always the next one. And the next after that. You probably already know who it is and you’re just not telling me, you tosser. What did you bring me?”
“And what makes you think I brought you anything?”
“Please. You’ve got that look about the mouth.” Her clothes are scattered over the back of a studded green velvet chair, a stocking trailing across the hearthrug, beckoning her to respectability or at least the last few ripped-lace shreds of her propriety. She ignores it and walks naked to the tiny mahogany table where Zevran is sitting, shuffling the crinkly sheets of his newspaper at her. “Why, Zevran Arainai. You man among men. Did you buy me breakfast?”
He swats at her thigh, all mock-indignation and scorn, dangling a small coffee cake just out of her reach in his teasing fingers. It makes her smile. “Get dressed first,” he says, “or else I’ll get the wrong idea, and we can’t have that, we can’t have that at all.”
It is in this way that they stitch their days together in lavish rented rooms and balmy seaside shacks, the lamplights glinting on the edges of their teeth, the russet-rich texture of the streets at dusk filling them up better than any wine. They have lunch by the seashore or in small cafés tucked away between bookshops and linen shops and mercenary rings masquerading as bakeries, grilled sole falling off the bone and pineapple with the rind still on, cold tea sour with hibiscus and strawberry; they stop at street vendors on the corners of the walkways, bartering for souvenirs to send no one and giving them to the barefoot children haunting the alleys like hungry ghosts just to watch them flit back to the shadows with their painted treasures.
At night, there are duels, thievery, con jobs, smuggling jobs, elaborate card cheats in pubs with men who never take off their hoods; it’s all part of the scenery, all part of the play, Antiva being the sort of place where blood is cleansed with blood and lies with lies, which means the streets are always very clean. Here, Isabela exults; she dances on the cobblestone under the new moon and sharpens her knives by firelight, wraps herself in the best jewelry bribe money can buy and steals what it can’t from noblemen who wouldn’t know how to dress a woman if she held their hands and showed them where she keeps her fun knickers. She learns that she is very good at this; she learns that she is very good at a lot of things, and she sharpens every one of them like a blade to keep at her back.
She learns to speak Orlesian and Antivan from women in empty taverns, learns the meter of Nevarran poetry. She learns her favorite foods, her favorite teashops, her favorite time of the day: the smattering of moments just before sunset, when the sky is draped with its inky blue twilight-hush and the first pinpricks of stars tear their way through the canvas; she learns that she likes to kiss Zevran in doorways, in courtyards, under the pier with lemon on their lips. They make love all night in their rented rooms and their stolen ocean villas. She moves against him like the moon pulling the tide, fluid, uninhibited. He gives her a cutting of a calla lily.
On the streets, after lunch, they walk down past the Chantry’s jeweled cathedral to the old market district where vendors in rickety wooden stalls sell butterscotch and cinnamon candies, tiny ceramic tiles with hollyhock and bluebirds painted in glossy reds and yellows, bunches of flowers with the morning dew still peppered on the petals. Isabela stops to look at them all, her sandals swinging from her hands, bare feet warming to the kiss of the dusty street.
“Flower for your pretty lady,” one of them says to Zevran, offering him a violet-white dog rose in his long fingers. He buys it for her; she sticks it behind her ear, thorns and all, and breathes it in all afternoon until it starts to cloy and wilt and the rot spreading underneath makes her skin itch, but she is happy for it. Happy for her drooping rose, happy for her dirty feet, happy to lie beside Zevran in a new room tonight, for his body and her body, for the scars etched into her skin, for her own beating heart.
The thing is, she never knew it could be like this, the way people dream it is, the way poets, those perennial liars, will tell you it is. She never knew she could want it to be like this, and she feels exposed, off-footed, as if she’s been caught out in a lie. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be, lying in the same bed night after night, letting monotony sink in, letting his stitches weave into places they were never meant to go. Because that’s not what this is about. That can’t be what this is about.
(Oh, but it could be, it could be, whispers the fluttering birdsong in her chest; her heart says this could be forever, but it has lied so many times before.)
In the still black softness just before dawn, Isabela unfurls like a nautilus from the bed and pulls on her stockings, her knickers, a pair of old trousers. Her trunk is already packed, her gold already hanging heavy over exposed skin, all the old clichés in place, and she’s got one foot out the door when Zevran turns over, eyes open, watching her through the spill of light slicing in from the hall.
“Already?” he asks, his voice thick with sleep and those congested syllables of goodbyes that always seem to catch in throats, his hair slipping across his face.
“You know me,” says Isabela, one hand toying with her necklace as she tries to school her face into some sincere sort of remoteness, “got a whole ocean-ful of trouble just waiting for these capable fingers to make it wriggle. Can’t do much with it if I’m treading water in one place.”
“Indeed,” says Zevran, turning his head toward her. The crook of his neck slopes down in a gentle arc, a good place to rest her head, and seeing it suddenly it makes her very tired. “Until next time, then, my dear.”
“Oh, next time,” she laughs. “I know you. We’ll have one night and then you’ll never write me, you’ll never visit. You absolute slag.”
“Ah, but then you would be gone before I woke, off with that voluptuous temptress, the morning sun,” he says, and smiles. “I know you.”
“Until then,” she says.
“Until then,” he agrees.
She pushes her trunk into the hallway with her heart thrumming in her throat; she swallows it down, and shuts the door.
—
Her name is Sophie. Her name is Sophie; she’s Orlesian, has a slight overbite, and she makes Isabela’s blood sing.
The brothel is a steady back-alley screw folded between a curio shop and a strange pawnbroker who only seems to be open between midnight and five a.m. on nights of the full moon, a white-sided bit of elegance with wrought iron balconies and flower boxes for primroses and petunias in the summer. Sophie’s room is upstairs, the first door on the left after the rough velvet staircase, and it is a watercolor study in chaos. Books jut out at impossible angles from every surface in the room: the coffee table, the desk, the dresser, the bedside table, the floor, the windowsills, the two bookshelves where they are stacked horizontally and vertically, dog-eared, stained, yellowing at the edges. Perfumes litter the claw-footed chiffonier by the glass doors leading out to the balcony, rose and gardenia and springtime honeysuckle stoppered up in glass, a neglected hairbrush lying beside a mottled pastel scarf. In a milky-white pitcher on the mantel, there is a single carnation blooming in full, long out of season now, though nothing is ever truly out of season in Val Royeaux if you know where to look.
Isabela, sprawled out on the mulberry-dark chaise in nothing but a corset and her lucky black lace knickers, takes a sip of her tea and closes her eyes to Sophie’s singsong poetry, her lyrical laughter, and lets her mind drift down to the garden where the peonies are drowned out by winter’s teeth, their leggy stalks caught beneath ice. Spring is months away, the sea churning cold blue-black water against her ship docked a few miles from here; she’s already been planted in this room a fortnight and imagines she can stay another, and maybe another after, just the two of them nestled in the warm curl of each other, not wearing much of anything at all and eating of milk and honey like it’s a sin.
Which it is, she reckons, so it’s a very good thing she doesn’t care at all.
“Car j’ai vécu de vous attendre,” Sophie murmurs to her, for her, “et mon cœur n’était que vos pas.”
“That’s a love poem,” says Isabela, feeling more than seeing her approach from behind her eyelids. “Are you going to serenade me next, hmm? I know you’ve got a lute in here, let’s have at it.”
Sophie laughs, a soft peal of summer breeze, tangling her fingers in Isabela’s hair as she walks to the wall-length glass doors; Isabela leans into the familiar, presumptuous touch. “Ma mignonne, ma fleur, ma poupée chérie, you know I sing like, how you say, one of your men with an angry wasp up his arse.”
“Only on Thursdays,” she argues, grinning, stretching her arms over her head. “You know what I think? I think you’d make for a fine pirate. A right brilliant con. You could just read them your poetry, like, and wear one of those blue silk frocks I love so very much, looking all vulnerable and wanton. Then, when Poor Unfortunate Number Twenty-Two makes his move—” she makes a very violent, expressive gesture with both hands, “—krrrgggsh. Five hundred sovereigns richer.”
“You overestimate me,” says Sophie, shaking her head and coming to sit by Isabela, pouring herself a cup of tea, the strap of her chemise falling off one shoulder. She’s smiling a very small, very wan little smile, shadows settling under her cheekbones. “Too late for me, yes. I would not last a month on your ship.”
“Mon chou, mon trésor, but you were made to be a bard. The killing kind of bard. The thieving kind of bard. The kiss-and-eviscerate kind of bard. Never too late to learn your poisonous flowering shrubs, Sophie.”
“Isabela,” she sighs. “I could not. You know I could not. I am getting old.”
It’s the third time they’ve had this not-argument, the third time it will end the way it always ends, if they let it: sour as salt, stale as sawdust, both of them with crossed legs and tight throats drinking their tea reflexively, quietly, stagnating in the sort of silence that says everything they don’t, a little too close to a proper couple’s row for comfort, but maybe there’s a certain pleasure in that, too—being allowed to have the sort of argument lovers might have, even if it isn’t real. The problem is, Isabela likes this routine of theirs; the problem is, they’re good together, she and Sophie and their poetry and their pipe dreams, but neither one of them knows how to budge even for each other even if they want to, and the real problem here—the really bloody miserable problem—is that they do, even if they never say it. They do, and there was a time when they might have, before all the maybes and could have beens piled up between them like cold spots in a room. Beside her, Sophie pulls her hair down, thick blonde curls falling almost to her waist, and takes a handful of it to show Isabela, gleaming in the dim light.
“See,” she says, leaning close, “grey. Getting too many to pluck out now. Lines on my eyes, aching in my fingers. Old, old, old, like just a little bagatelle. Tant pis. You see.”
“You’re not even thirty-five, you nutter.”
“I feel it, sometimes. I feel older.”
“I’ll have you know I’ve always had a thing for older women. Have ever since I broke in and set my sorry eyes on your flaxen locks and your gorgeous arse bent over the balcony with a book,” says Isabela, trying for something lighter instead, batting her eyelashes and tugging Sophie’s earlobe between her teeth. The draft blows the hair on the back of her neck the wrong way in a gust of cold air.
And here's the other bloody miserable thing, though you must have figured it out by now: what she wants Sophie to do is wrap her arms around her and ask her to run away with her or join her crew or come dancing with her on the streets of Antiva just because; what she wants is for Sophie, just once, to say, Yes. She’s not surprised when she never does, of course. Isabela doesn’t want to be in love; she doesn’t love Sophie and she told her as much, only, you know, if she could, if there was anyone, it would be her, so sorry about that, you know how it goes. No honey-sick delusions here. Sophie just smiled and didn’t blame her for it, didn’t ask for what Isabela wouldn’t give, and what keeps surprising her now is how much it hurts that they just can't take to each other, but it shouldn’t. You don’t spit in the doctor’s face. You don’t shun the rope when you’re drowning; even she knows that much.
It’s a stupid thing to think, as if they know how to fix everything that’s wrong with each other, anyway.
“A thing for older women,” Sophie drawls, cocking her head to the side. It makes her look younger and just a little wicked. “Mmm. And yet you still break in every time. Does not do much for your reputation, no.”
“We’ve transcended the need for front doors, and reputations. And clothes. Do try to keep up, mon trognon.”
Sophie laughs, sudden and warm. It unfurls in Isabela’s chest and sticks there, thrumming with her heart.
“And—yes, older women. Older woman. I mean, if they gave out titles for the things you do with your tongue, you’d be a bloody queen by now. You could suck the gold out of a Templar's purse,” says Isabela. “Celene should be quaking in her blue silk boots. You, Sophie, you know how to buckle a girl’s swashes.”
“Oh, my dear,” gasps Sophie, in a stunning rendering of the Divine Mother Justinia V’s flickering tenor, “I do not think that is appropriate Chantry-going conversation, Sister Isabela.” She pushes her against the chaise, slips a hand between her legs. Steals the sorrow out of her mouth.
Later, under the red quilt with their legs tangled together and their hair shuffled up black-and-blonde on the pillow they’re sharing, Sophie turns in her arms and presses her mouth, open and hot, to the hollow of Isabela’s throat where the pulse runs wild, her eyelashes tickling her skin. From the bed she can see the streetlamps, casting lonesome shadows over the new snow; Val Royeaux in the winter is an amnesiac recollection of itself, all faded out, all blurred at the edges. It’s easy to get lost, here, even easier to forget.
“I think,” Sophie murmurs into her chest, “I think you know why I am here. Because there was nowhere else for me. Because I had to be. Mostly, I want to be.” She shifts up, pulling Isabela’s hand with her, holding it between her breasts. “I think you know why you are where you are.”
“Same, mostly,” she says, touching Sophie’s skin there, “that is, because I want to. Had to. You know that.”
“And I think,” says Sophie, “that life—that the world—it has hurt us both, you and me. But we fight it differently, yes? Different shoes on different feet, ma belle. You could not be happy here, and I could not be happy there, not now, not, not right for us. Too late for that now, you see? You see.”
There was a woman, once, when she was fourteen. A woman, she didn’t know who, down at the docks on the day of her wedding, a woman who, somehow, knew. I’m sorry, she’d said, taking Isabela’s hand, I know this doesn’t feel real, and it was so ridiculous because nothing was ever more real. Her mother didn’t even come. She never saw the fisherwoman from the north with the pomegranates again, never could have, not after that, not after how much she leaned to hate Llomerryn, not after the holes she clawed her way out of, not after she learned that the only way to live was to cut and run, run, run. All those things really happened to her, sank down inside her like sediment; no one was ever going to save her. When the woman let go of her hand, her heart beat so hard against her chest she was afraid it might fall out and she didn’t think she would miss it at all.
Nothing was ever more real.
“I do,” Isabela whispers, curling her fingers into Sophie’s chest. “I’m—I just—”
“Shhh, Isabela. We had a good wintertime, yes? We did.” She kisses Isabela, and it may just be the best kiss she’s ever had in her life, soft and quiet and sad. Her eyes are so bright, she is so alive. “We had a good wintertime. Always, when the snow falls, I will be thinking of you. When I look outside, when I see it, I will think, Ah, my beauty, here you are, and you have found me. You will have found me.”
In the morning, with Sophie pressed warm against her back, she looks out the window from the bed and watches the banners ripple in the wind, all down the boardwalk where her ship is waiting with the flags lined up in reds and blues, shimmering, sighing, like one last breath pushed from exhausted lungs.
—
“I swear by my Aunt Fanny’s fanny, that is the—would you look at it? That is the most devastatingly gorgeous ship I’ve ever seen. D’you think,” Hawke lowers her voice, “d’you think she knows I’m talking about her?”
“You’re lit, old girl,” Isabela laughs, pulling Hawke away from the dock. “Lit as a candlestick. Get away from the water, I don’t want to change your trousers again.”
“I’m just saying,” Hawke says rather louder than necessary as she trips into Isabela, “if ships were food, that sailboat over there would be a crusty prune pudding, and that ship—your ship, Maker’s sagging, gold-plated arse cheeks—would be a twelve-tiered wedding cake with sugared violets. A whole kitchen full of canapés and pâté. A buffet of—of rosemary potatoes.”
“You’re making me hungry, you sloppy tart. Come on. And close your mouth.”
“Do shut up, old gal, I’m not that drunk.” Hawke dusts off her trousers and shakes her coalstone hair out of her eyes, twining her arm through Isabela’s elbow all the way up the dock. “You smell nice. Have you been baking?”
“I’ve been eating those biscuits we stole from Orsino. Remember?”
“Yum,” says Hawke, taking a great sniff of her neck. It tickles. “Want to sit by the shore for a bit? I’ll buy sandwiches and we can watch the sun go down on this Day of Days and feel like a sixty-year-old Orlesian couple living in Tantervale.”
“Oh, stop, now you’ve got me all tingly. What are you going to do about it? Madame Hawke, what are you going to do about it?”
“Buy some turkey on wheat, probably,” she grins, and she’s off.
Down at the seashore, the sun is just starting to sink down toward the fluid curve of the earth, painting the sky as red as beating hearts and the autumn-crowned trees threaded through the city, the air here cool-bright, apple-crisp; someone nearby is tending a fire, the maple smoke willowy and woodsy on the evening breeze. Good sleeping weather. Good sock-sorting weather, too, though she’ll never admit she actually does that.
Even for the better part of the six years they’ve been doing this, she doesn’t stay at Hawke’s estate much but then, neither does Hawke herself anymore, all the empty rooms with their single living ghost haunting the library and the sitting room and feasting on regret, doing nothing but missing people in all those innumerable, immemorial little ways you never stop missing people: in the dog roses, in the snow, in the pomegranate left on the kitchen table, in the quick quirk of a thought or a joke you’ve got no one to tell when you turn around. Isabela knows, and that is why she said nothing when Hawke settled into her rented room last year and made a nest of it; Isabela knows, and that is why she grabs this golden sliver of a thing they’ve made by the throat and holds on with all the strength her weathered palms will allow.
Of course, you’ve got to learn to at least trust in the strength of your own hands in the first place if you’re going to do that. It isn’t easy, but it works a lot better if you’ve got someone hanging on with you.
A few breaths of sea-crisp air and there comes a soft knock at the back of her head to punctuate the truth of that, which turns out to be Hawke with a bread crust stuffed full of meat and cheese. “Ham and goat cheese for you, turkey and cheddar for me, and nothing but the deep blue beneath. Cheers, my little kidney bean.”
“Just you and me and the fishes,” says Isabela, though she’s midway through a bite of ham and cheese so it comes out as, “Hrrm hmmm mmm mhhhh oo-aaammm mmhhh.”
“Just us two and the flounder,” agrees Hawke. This, Isabela thinks, is love in its most undiluted form: the ability to understand someone when their mouth is full of sandwich.
It’s too chilly to stick their feet in the water, so they just take their shoes off and dangle their feet above, watching the sun bleed between their toes and dim like wine into water. She’s got a bowl of peaches on her table at the Hanged Man, the last of the season; she really ought to start thinking about redecorating her new captain’s cabin, but it feels insignificant, unimportant when there are still late-summer peaches and Hawke’s feet swinging off the dock beside her, tossing the heel of her bread to the fish, the two of them their own island on the dock. Overhead, the nighthawks flit in and out of sight, warbling their mournful twilight goodbyes to the salt air; they will be gone soon, flown for warmer shores, and Isabela will be dragging scratchy wool trousers out of her trunk just in time to greet the snowbirds.
And she’s looking forward to it. She is looking forward to the sight of her anchor buried in the Waking Sea so she can slag off all day with Hawke, laugh at Fenris struggling with his salt-stained snow boots, eat Aveline’s ill-advised dinner experiments with Merrill, buy the latest installment of Easy and Enchanted: The Totally True Tales of Marguerite, the Buxom Apostate-Assassin and read the filthiest bits aloud to Sebastian, who will stifle his laughter and primly correct all the grammatical errors before she sends it off to Bethany. It’s a strange feeling, being so happy to have been wrong about something, learning to plant herself right on her own two feet and let the weeds grow around her ankles.
“Sun’s almost done,” says Hawke, her face tilted up to their darkening Kirkwall sky. “What a day, what a day. You know, a robust one like this really calls for something special.”
“Does it.”
“That is what I’m saying. I’m saying we really ought to send it off with a bang. A punch. A long, firm lick to its tender bits.”
“Something special,” says Isabela, very slowly.
“That is what I’m saying,” Hawke repeats, blinking at her, and blinking some more, and some more. And then, “Oh, for—I’m not saying it. Not this time. Not this day.”
“Oh, piss, oh, dear,” says Isabela, wiping bread crumbs from her mouth with the back of her hand and stretching rather more suggestively than is necessary, “that nip in the air’s just going to kill my throat, you know, I really should be getting home. Terribly important business. Early morning appointments, dreadful things, just can’t wait, you know how it is, Serah—”
“Kiss me, you stallion, you mad dog, you scarlet temptress of the night! Here, now, now!”
Isabela kisses her, and kisses her, and kisses her.
By the time she pulls back, their mouths are red and wet and puffy and they can hear sailors wandering down the shore, shouting for something or other as she lies down on the creaking dock beside Hawke, their autumn stars popping out in familiar patterns above them. She shifts over so she can push her face into the crook of Hawke’s neck, presses her nose right where there will be an extremely conspicuous mark for days and breathes her in, wild and sweet, cotton-warm, as solid and as sure as any foundation under her feet has ever been or ever will be.
“They’re going to think we’re having it off over here,” she says as Hawke plays with her fingers almost absently.
“Yes, well, twenty seconds longer and they wouldn’t have been wrong, now would they.”
“That’s not what you told Dulci de Launcet at her solstice party,” Isabela laughs. It is her favorite laugh, warm and belly-deep, the one she knows Hawke loves to pull out of her, surprised, rich, a sound it thrills her to make. “In fact, if I recall, you told her you’d spilled a whole plate of bruschetta down your dress and that was why I had my hand down your knickers.”
“That was so completely your fault, you great wine-arsed tart, you groped me. You know, you know how I get in fancy bathrooms, and what do you do? Stick your tongue in my ear in Dulci de Launcet’s pink salle de bain.”
“I’m not the daft slag who dragged me in there in the first place.”
“And I’d do it again,” says Hawke, pressing Isabela’s fingers to her lips. “I’d absolutely do it all again.”
“Even with the bribe money?”
“Even with the bribe money.”
All the way own the docks, the masts of her new ship twist in the wind like snowy clouds dreaming of some far-off shore; Isabela closes her eyes to their muffled sway, the windswept voices speaking a language she knows now and knows well: Hush, hush, they say, take the seasons as they come. Take your youth. Take your life. She’s not fluent in the future, but as far as fate goes, you can't hope for much better than a fresh peach and cold toes pressing into your cold toes on a bed big enough to hold you both.
Hawke turns her head so they’re facing each other, shaped like a couple of question marks on the dock as the moon rises up and over, flat-edged and pale as chalk. There’s still a crumb on her chin; Isabela flicks her tongue out and takes it. “Want to know something?” Hawke asks, thumbing Isabela’s cheek and then slipping her fingers under her chin, down to her neck where the pulse throbs like waves, like clocks.
“I know most of your somethings,” she says. “And I like you anyway.”
“This is a special something. A real banger.”
“Is this about how you keep chocolate in your knickers? How you turn the color of radishes whenever someone says ‘shrubbery?’ My favorite is the one where you confuse the Orlesian for ‘to kiss’ and ‘to fuck’ every time, every single time.”
“You told me you’d never mention that second one again.”
“But it’s my second favorite,” she laughs, squeezing Hawke around the hip and feeling her shake with poorly repressed laughter. “For such a roguish catch of a woman, you’re not very, y’know. Stealthy.”
“Ah, yes, let’s make fun of Marian Hawke,” she sniffs. “Just because some of our company have a little more practice maneuvering their gratuitous nudity out of harm’s way.”
“Merrill didn’t get caught. Neither did your sister. Neither did Aveline.”
“So you’re more discreet about swimming naked because you’ve got yourself some experience with public indecency and misconduct,” Hawke grumbles through the smile twitching onto her lips. “Good show, old chap, but no one cares.”
She snorts into Hawke’s shoulder, once, then twice for good measure. “And where would you be without my expertise, I’d like to know. All you’ve got to recommend you are your naked bits and imaginary bruschetta down your dress.”
“My bloody hero,” says Hawke, slapping her bum and laughing the way Isabela loves more than any sailor song and any poetry, more than any storm-rough waves, the one she wants to bottle up and keep like honey, which is an incredibly stupid thing to think. Probably, it means she’s screwed and she’s been screwed for a long time now. Probably, it means she loves Marian Hawke to a degree that is utterly, unremittingly, milk-curdlingly daft, and she’s not getting out of this one with life, limb, or lucky blue knickers intact.
Probably, she’s pretty happy about that.
So, because she is one spaghetti noodle short of mental, because she is daft and happy and sated with sandwich, she presses an open-mouthed kiss to Hawke’s neck, thrilling in the soft catch of her breath, the salty-powdery taste of her skin there she knows so well. “Come on, then,” she murmurs, “tell me your something.”
“I’m not sure I want to tell you anymore. You’ve wounded me. I’m probably bleeding in very delicate places right now.”
“Oh, bugger and tragedy, just say it. I promise not to laugh too much.”
Hawke pulls her hand through Isabela’s hair, rubbing against her temple, winding the strands around her fingers and smoothing them out again, softly, softly. Far off, the last of the cicadas croak out their raspy crescendo in the trees. “I was just thinking this is kind of brilliant, you know?” she says. The swell of the water on the docks and the sand flows beneath their toes; somewhere, someone is ringing a bell, lazy and slow, not for them to pay any mind. “And it is. It’s bloody brilliant.”
“It is,” says Isabela, and she smiles into her shoulder.
“I think,” says Hawke, shifting gently against her, “I think that if this is all we had, you know, I’d be fine. If this one moment right now just stretched out forever, or if some nutter exploded the whole world all of a sudden, crash, bang, loads of screaming in the streets, you know, a right proper cataclysmic event. I mean, if someone just slammed the book shut, just like that—if this here is all we got, forever—well, I’d be all right with that. I’d be happy.”
Isabela’s heart, her monstrous heart, leaps into her mouth; she opens it, and whispers, “Me, too.”
The ships creak and sway with the sea, with the waves, rush-and-still, rush-and-still, their restless clamor melting softly into the folds of the night, lonely always for their own uncharted homes. Down on the docks, on an early autumn night in Kirkwall with her sparse stars strung brighter than lanterns above the warm, sweet ocean, Isabela rests her head against Hawke’s shoulder, in the solidity of themselves, and all the spaces in between.