"No, no," he tipped his head down but couldn't wipe away the smile stretching his cheeks. "She asked if she could buy you off of me for one of her daughters."
"What?!" Cullen leapt backwards, falling out of the cheap sandals he'd worn on deck. "That is preposterous, and no, do not look upon me like that. No!" He shook his head violently at the woman.
"That's not helping your case there," Alistair spoke up. "That whole head shaking is more like a nod here for her, and...hang on." He slipped into the tongue that the man knew far better than he let on. Cullen had no idea what he said, but the woman's eyes widened first in shock, then acceptance before finally pity overflowed from them. She waved her fingers together in a heretical sign of Andraste's Eye and thrusted them at Cullen in a blessing.
Smiling at her, and then whatever affianced leper he turned Cullen into, Alistair broke away from the counter and tipped his head to the woman. Without turning back to the man he could have sold off, the king walked down the boardwalk his eyes following the line of soldiers winding out of a small food cart. Whistling for Honor to follow, Cullen pursued him but kept a good pace and a half behind, not out of respect but because he didn't want anyone else to think they were together.
"What did you tell her?" he called.
"Does it matter? It worked. She has nooo interest in you now. Is that often a problem for you? Old ladies trying to scoop you up for their daughters or granddaughters?"
Cullen growled and Honor repeated it, the fur along her back rising. He ran his fingers along it to smooth down the blue-black hair. His dog attacking the king of Ferelden would pretty much banish him from ever seeing his family ever again. Why was everyone always on him about his romantic life? Early on no one cared beyond the occasional titter about how he lacked in whatever aspect made someone an acceptable catch. And in Kirkwall he...did not care himself. Even after the deep roads, it barely changed beyond the few wistful nights when he wished the world would realign itself just for him to be with her. But the moment he signed up with the Inquisition suddenly everyone was on his case about settling down, finding someone, being happy. Happy was overrated.
He didn't realize he'd frozen in his tracks until he looked up and spotted the king further along the sidewalk. Alistair paused as well, his head tossed back to jut out his chin while he thought. "It's not your fault if you've been with someone else."
"What?" Cullen whipped up, but the king didn't turn around. He continued to speak to a ghost in front of him instead of the man he barely knew behind.
"Two years, it's a long time. Add in believing she's dead, and..."
Cullen stomped towards him while hissing, "You have no concept of what I, I've never! And yet you, with..." He snorted, tossing his head to find a balance in his words before continuing. "I am not you. Do not presume to judge."
"Yeah, I caught on to that fact real quick. Are you allergic to laughing or is it a lifestyle choice?" Now the king turned on his heel and it wasn't that smug lording look in his eyes but a misplaced compassion. "Look, I get it. You're a man with all the corresponding urges and...yeah, I'm not finishing that thought. Point is, it's natural to move on, find comfort. Healthy."
"What makes you believe I've been anything but faithful?"
Alistair winced at that, "It's not being unfaithful if...Maker's breath, I was just trying to say that you shouldn't feel guilty for, you know, catching a few eyes and enjoying that."
"There have been no eyes caught here or otherwise," Cullen spat.
"That soldier of yours practically tossing her silk underthings at your feet while she waved goodbye seemed to be giving you the once and twice over."
Andraste's holy pyre. Cullen sagged at the mention of Addley. He hadn't meant it to be anything romantic, not at first. Perhaps not even after. She had served under him for years, even in Kirkwall. It may have been the reason why he found himself spending more time with her as he pieced himself back together. They shared a strange history of walking through the same fires and coming out alive. But, he'd never tried anything, never would have, even if on occasion... By the Maker, he hated himself. He hated he wasn't strong enough to have faith in Lana. He'd waited ten years, but he couldn't keep his mind pure for a couple more?
"Okay, that didn't go the way I meant. I'm sorry, uh," Alistair waved his royal fingers near Cullen's broken form without touching him. "All I was driving at was that Lanny's not a romantic like that. She doesn't wish on stars and believe in one true loves."
"What a surprise considering what you did to her," Cullen scoffed from below his hooded brow.
Alistair threw his arms up and buried his fingers in his hair. Even with passing sailors watching, he yanked his head back and forth like a metronome. "This is why I don't try to do anything nice for you. I'd be better off nailing my hand to the wall."
"There's nothing stopping you."
"Ha, that's true. Anyone got a hammer I could borrow?" he rose up on his royal toes to glance around the splintery docks. "You want to have at me, you can. Double points for my lacking hygiene and table manners. I doubt you could do more damage than Morrigan ever managed. She can destroy you with a single glance if she's half a mind."
"Play your games all you want, act as if you're the wounded party," Cullen cursed at him. He staggered back to his feet to face down the king. "I know why you'd engage in this journey, spend Maker knows how much coin to bring her back. You think this grand gesture will win her over."
Alistair blinked a few times in his face and then the softest laugh broke down his throat. It increased in jocularity, a braying punctuated between the laughs until it all crashed to a halt. "Wait? Are you serious? Maker, no wonder you've been like a poker up the backside. Lanny and I, we had our chance. A chance that I, yes, screwed up royally -- pun intended. In the end, we spent more time as friends, good friends. I knew she had my back and I had hers for anything, no matter what. She deserves everything at my disposal."
"You love her," Cullen said. He'd known, it was hard to escape the obvious fact staring him in the face. Someone didn't risk his life, his crown, his kingdom to chase a rumor halfway across thedas unless his heart was involved.
Alistair snapped his teeth in thought, then sighed, "Of course I do, it's Lanny. How do you not love her? But..." He wiggled his fingers through each other, watching them intersect like locking rings, "I'm not in love with her. Not anymore. That's all on you now, so..."
'And I'm to believe that?' hung in Cullen's throat. It made no sense to think the man was beyond her, but the starkness in the king's face, the way he squared his shoulders while taking on the full brunt of Cullen's glare gave him pause. It smelled like the truth. "May I..." Cullen coughed from a bolus catching in his throat, "may I hold the phylactery?"
He expected the king to refuse, almost all requests got an 'it's fine, says she's still west,' but Alistair paused and nodded. Their conversation must have struck back at him, the king's own voice raw, "Of course." Digging into the satchel, he dropped the pulsing bottle into Cullen's cupped hands. "You can keep it until nightfall on the ship. I have a dozen more council members to buy shiny things for and I'd rather we not have to chase down some adorable street urchin who picked it off me."
As Cullen's fingers drifted around the glass, his mind snapped towards the Anderflls and the whisper of her voice carried on the wind. He couldn't make out the words, but it almost sounded like a song she'd hum under her breath. "Thank you," he said, lost in the promise of her life.
Chapter Ten
Peeling
9:44 Waking Sea
"Maker, though the darkness comes upon me, I shall embrace the Light. I shall weather the storm," Cullen's clasped hands trembled -- the skin raw from the tear of salt water, the calluses rising from every grip of striated rope. He kneeled in his corner where on occasion a few pirates watched from across the way. They never joined in, but they didn't call out or interrupt either. No one seemed certain what to do about the man who was neither chantry nor civilian.
"Who knows me as You do? You have been there since before my first breath. You have seen me when no other would recognize my face..." Cullen paused again, the next words rattling against his abraded nerves. "You," he wet his cracked lips and gazed down at the dog prostrated before him. What Honor got out of his praying was beyond him, but she never left his side. "Maker, You composed the cadence of my heart."
His tenuous grip slipped, Cullen's palms parting as the rest of the prayer faded from his mind. Why? Why did the Maker have to build his heart to yearn for hers? Grief swelled up, devouring the meager strength in his body. He fumbled off his knees to land against a support beam, an unfinished nail swiping at his already tattered shirt. What was he doing here? Bobbing on the middle of the northern sea passage on the way to Tevinter, he -- a once knight-captain of the templars -- risked his life, his position, his sanity for...for what? People didn't come back from the dead. They passed through the fade and on to the Maker's side. Two years, for over 600 hundred days he'd struggled through the grief like a man crawling across broken glass. And, just when he thought he found peace, fate threw him a final foolish chance.
Peace. Cullen snickered at himself for the thought. No, it wasn't peace. He'd found monotony, safety in the mundane of moving through the motions of living without risking himself again. He packed his heart away in the sky blue bottle along with her false ashes. By the Maker, what was he doing here? They'd had, what, a few months together, and that was being generous. For all he knew, Lana had no plans to...
His head collapsed onto his chest and he shook it. No, he was trying to stir back up the anger because hating her, hating himself, hate in general felt better than the frozen lake of grief. As strange as it sounded, the idea that the king intended to swipe her out from under him kept him going. It struck against the primal competitive nerve. Before, Cullen didn't worry what would happen if they reached the end of their journey and discovered nothing; how he'd face the empty journey back. His only concern was in beating Alistair. And now... He believed him -- believed that, despite putting so much effort into finding her, he had no intentions beyond possible friendship. Not that Lana will be forgiving and forgetting his transgressions so...
He kept doing that. His mind waffled between past and present tense. Sometimes she was long gone, lost in the fade two years ago, nothing but ash in the wind. Others, occasionally even mid-sentence, he believed as fervent as anything in him that she remained out there, alive and reachable. If the ship didn't kill him, the hope would.
Patting Honor on the head, he rose to his feet. Despite dressing for bed, as much as one did on a pirate ship, Cullen needed to move and walk until his muscles collapsed in exhaustion or his brain would torture him the entire night. "Do you want to go for a walk, girl?" he asked Honor, but the dog huffed from her blanket. He was steady as a rock, but the mabari kept a schedule that couldn't be shattered by a sapper. No one loved her bedtime as much as Honor. "All right, guard the bunk while I'm gone then."
He wasn't concerned about the others swiping his things. To begin, he barely had anything worthy of attention. If that were not enough, the pirates also seemed slightly terrified of the ex-templar, a few of them protecting themselves with the same warding eye whenever he passed. Superstition ran deep on the waves. Cullen was uncertain if a templar on board was good or bad luck, and the pirates appeared just as lost on the matter.
A good three-fourths of the crew slipped into their own rocking beds for the night, an ungodly sound echoing through the maze-like hold as they tried to out snore each other. Cullen ducked low to avoid the higher pirates as he trekked not onto the deck, but deeper towards the stern of the ship. A tempting light flickered from below the generous gap of a closed door on the port side. Curiosity chasing away his dour thoughts, he pulled back on the knotted rag jammed into a hole to create a handle and found himself standing in the kitchen. It was a generous way to describe the room which held a few massive pots, barrels of salted meat, and the turned back of a man chopping his way through potatoes.
Of course, it had to be him. Alistair, the king of Ferelden, sat perched upon a three legged stool, his thumb guiding a dagger along the skin of a potato while whistling under his breath. He let the curling waste lay where it landed creating a potato skin moat around the king. When he finished, his half out-of-tune song paused, and he dropped the tater into the other barrel. The turn was enough for the king to catch Cullen skulking around behind him.
"Come for dinner?" he asked, holding up his sheered vegetable. "Or is it breakfast, now?"
"The sun's yet to rise. That's dinner as far as I am concerned," Cullen answered.
"Everyone gets all hung up on midnight. It is the new day according to these fancy calendars here. How about we call it the new day when we see, I don't know, daylight maybe?"
He could leave him, head to the hatch or return to his hammock and attempt to sleep. But Cullen inched closer into the room. "Why are you doing that?"
"Eating them with the skins on will poison you," Alistair said. He picked up another potato and got to work. "I need something to do, to keep myself busy or my mind's all 'Hey Alistair, now's a great time to talk about all the ways you've screwed up this week. And if we've got time, we'll go over your failures from a month ago as well your poor hygiene and posture.'"
Cullen waved his head at the blather but the man's words bore a semblance of sense. There were no other stools and barely enough breathing room as was, but Cullen inched into the room and hopped up onto one of the lime barrels.
Alistair waved at the pile of potatoes then lifted an eyebrow, "You wanna have a go at 'em too?"
"Why not," he shrugged accepting both potato and paring knife from royalty. For a good three or so they sat in silence, peeling potatoes that a ship full of pirates would eat in the morning. Cullen would look over and watch the king work through his mess like a trained chef. He was able to get an entire skin in one go, the knotted flesh trailing off his blade like a brown ribbon. "You are surprisingly good at this."
"I had a lot of practice," Alistair said. "The trick is to piss enough people off they send you to the kitchens to do this for hours." After chuckling at his own joke, he picked back up a whistle, but it wasn't the song from before. Almost under his breath, he began to recite a templar canticle. It wasn't anything known outside of the order, not for any secretive reasons. It simply held no baring to others.
"How do you know that?" Cullen asked, his own potato's skin dangling forgotten off his thumb.
"Know what?"
"The code, the mnemonic to remember the order of discipline for disrupting mana?"
The king blinked a few times as his eyebrows met in the middle. "Don't you know? I thought everyone knew. Boy, who do you have to kill and take the crown of to get the attention of a town cryer? Me," he patted his chest with his spud, "Alistair: the tale of the man who was a king, before that a grey warden, and before that...a templar."
A templar? Cullen's eyes widened. No. This man was damn near heretical in his thoughts on the chantry, on the order, on...Templars were her blindspot, he said it. Maker take him, he was right.
Alistair didn't notice Cullen's internal monologue. He dumped his fifth potato into the bucket and continued, "And before that a bastard child no one wanted. That old cliché tale." His fingernails dug into his next conquest and he turned to Cullen, "You don't remember me, do you?"
"Remember? I..." Cullen was still stuck on the king of Ferelden, the man who helped end the blight and who stole Lana's heart, being a templar himself. How had he never heard it?
"It's okay. Took my awhil
e to dredge you up, not that I don't do my best to forget every second in templar training."
"No," Cullen shook his head, struggling to try and pick through hundreds of templars who'd crossed his path over the years. "We never..."
"Yup, you and I grew up in the same order together. Even the same dormitory. Didn't have a thing to do with each other, thank the Maker. You had your little crew of devoted converts and I had..." he stabbed his knife into the potato and lifted it up to his eyes, "these guys."
"I..." he couldn't understand. He refused to understand. The king of Ferelden was in the templar order. He had been there, learned beside him, studied and fought beside him, and Cullen didn't even remember. "Why would you join the order?"
"Well, there's joining and then there's joining. I didn't get much say in the joining part. Threw a royal fit over it when at ten they packed me off to the chantry because the Arlessa didn't like having a little bastard running around." He didn't sound bitter over it, only shrugged and plopped his finished work away. Then again, being king now he could have ordered his own revenge upon this Arlessa. "Never did the vows, or the lyrium, which worked out well given my ever changing vocation. I hated it, all of it. I didn't want to hunt mages."
"That wasn't what I wanted either."
Alistair tipped his head, "Wanted as a kid, maybe."
"And now," Cullen bit back. He anticipated a return to their argument, but the king accepted it for once or at least shut up, an even greater miracle.
"You were a few years ahead of me, and a model templar too. Always polishing your armor and what not. Bundled you off to the tower with rose petals in your wake. Me? I wonder what the Grand Cleric had in mind for what to do with a sulking, insubordinate fool. Her exact words. She threw an epic fit when Du- I was recruited into the grey wardens, but I was ecstatic."
A dark thought trailed through Cullen's mind and he couldn't stop a laugh at the idea. The king lifted a shoulder and then rolled his knife to encourage the man to explain. "We could have both been at the tower together. Both have met her..."
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