Anna never imagined she’d be pulled back into her family, not after they’d basically turned her into the Templars when she was a child and then paid the Templars to take her far away from Orlais. She definitely never imagined to be pulled back in forcibly, ripped from her home in the Free Marches, from her partners, from her daughter, from everything that she loved and held dear.
In order to get her to stay and play nice, her parents were forced to threaten those people that Lyric held dear, by putting a price on their heads with the House of Repose. It was still hard to believe that her sister was dead and although it was nice to see her twin brother again, she wasn’t exactly happy to be marrying her sister’s betrothed, but as long as her family was threatened, she really had no choice. Part of that meant acting the part around Tiberius.
They were due to have brunch with Tiberius, and since he wasn’t currently in the home, she was currently trying to talk her parents out of all the crazy they had decided to drop on their now only daughter, but it was like trying to ask the wind to stop blowing. There was much eye rolling and sighing and begging, but then the servants announced they had a guest, so suddenly everything went silent. She put on the best smile she could as they announced their guest.
Tiberius left the card on the tray unread and dressed himself in a gray haze. He recognized the looping scrawl of Martiette Nicollier’s handwriting at a glance. A summons – there were only two things it could possibly be about. The girl or the money. Truthfully, at this point he wanted neither. Only it rankled him to give these people anything. They didn’t deserve it.
Best to get it over with quickly. Tell them no, choke down a shabby breakfast, go home, go back to sleep because that would surely be all he could stand today. Yet the walk over was too short, the Nicollier townhouse gleaming in the morning sun, one within a row of identical homes. The butler showed him in, preventing him from indulging in any further hesitancy.
“The family is expecting you in the yellow parlor, Mr. Umbra. May I take your coat?”
”No. I won’t be staying long.” Tiberius strode past him and into the house. He knew it well enough to find his way by now. The room in question was comfortable, intimate. For hosting family, not guests. It would be the girl, then. Why it had taken the family months to produce her, Tiberius could not begin to guess. Really, he was particularly incurious on the subject.
In profile, she looked so much like her sister. Enough to stop him in his tracks, hovering uncertainly in the doorway until Mariette espied him and made a shrill greeting, launching up from her chair. The older woman hurried over to kiss the air on either cheek – in reality, more in the vicinity of his collarbone. All the Nicollier women he’d met were very short.
Tiberius ignored her, guided to an empty seat at the table by Mariette’s over familiar hand at the small of his back. He stared at her daughter, vaguely aware that he was being rude. The resemblance was distressing, a strange tension wrapped around his spine and forced itself down his throat. He– Men did not weep – and certainly not in front of these awful Orlesion vultures.
”I’m sorry. You’re, uh … Real, then?” He finally looked away, down at his plate. The smell of cooked meat was nauseating. His fingers clasped around the looped handle of a tea cup. If he could bear to touch it, it was too cold already. ”I hadn’t really thought so.”
Lyric, feeling the weight of his gaze, swallowed hard and nodded. Yes, I'm real. And I'm really here, she responded, her voice steady despite the whirlwind of emotions inside her. The room seemed to shrink around them, the air becoming heavy with unsaid words and unasked questions.
She wasn’t sure what else to say at the moment, she glanced from her parents and then back to Tiberius, she really wished her brother was there. At least she got along with him, versus how she felt about her parents. All she could think about was what might happen to Akibrus and Aria if she didn’t go along with her parents dumb plan.
She was sad her sister had died, but why not just end it there. Stupid contracts and stupid arranged marriages, and why couldn’t Tiberius just find a wife in Tevinter. She did her best not to let her emotions about it all show on her face though. Sure she hadn’t been in Orlais since her parents had turned her into the Templars, but that didn’t mean she didn’t know how to play the game. Her mother cleared her throat.
”Yes, this is Lyric. As I explained when she showed magic as a child, the Templars took her to a Circle in the Free Marches.” Lyric did her best not to roll her eyes, and smiled instead. Her mother acting like the decision to be sent to the Free Marches wasn’t their own idea, like now all of a sudden they are all woke and all right with mages was a joke.
Lukewarm black tea, and stale too. Tiberius drained the cup in a couple gulps anyway, glancing between Mariette and her silent husband and back to Lyric again. Girl was unfair when she was clearly a woman grown – and perhaps he’d remember the name better now with a face to put it to.
“That’s quite the journey. Which Circle, if you do not mind my asking?” Not Kirkwall, he hoped. While he was unfamiliar with southern mages on the whole, that Circle’s troubles so many years ago were quite infamous. The sort of things that left deep scars which he’d be ill suited to tending to. And if, for example, she were squeamish about blood magic … He hardly wanted to go through all this trouble for a wife that might fail to thrive.
Perhaps that would explain Lyric’s strained smile, fixed in place. Considering her answer, Tiberius loaded a piece of toast with early garden greens, soft white cheese, and pickled primrose flowers. He ate slowly, unwilling to do much to alleviate the heavy silence. Truthfully, there was a bitter sort of pleasure in watching M. and Mme. Nicollier flounder in the rotten heart of their own mess.
But soon he was out of toast, and nothing else at the table could tempt his inconstant appetite. Tiberius cleaned his hands and threw the napkin onto his plate.
“Well, let’s see some magic then, shall we?” He grinned at Lyric over the table, toothy and rather mirthless. “I want to know what I’ve bought, after all.”And they should know they should fear people like us. It left a bad taste in his mouth, this thought of sending your own children away. Not for a season or two, but for their entire lives – only to call them back only when they were useful.
“I think we ought to go outside.” He stood and walked out without waiting for confirmation, striding directly into the back garden. In a few months, it would be crowded with heavy rose blossoms in half a dozen shades of pink and red. Now, it was all woody stalks and thorns and wrought iron filigree. A little sad, without the flowers lending an illusion of depth. You could see right up to the fence that separated this back garden from the next.
It was hard not to think about Aria and Akibrus, hard not to think about the threats her parents had made against them. Her parents made a profession out of playing the game, so she knew the threat was real. They wouldn’t hesitate to hurt the things Lyric loved if they didn’t get what they wanted. She smiled at the question about the Circle she was in.
I was in Starkhaven. She wondered if he’d question at any point why she hadn’t returned home when the Circles fell over a decade earlier, or at the very least when the Templar/Mage war had ended. She took a sip of her tea, she wanted to say more. She was usually a very bubbly talker, but she was trying so hard not to say the wrong things, that she wasn’t quite acting herself either.
As he asked about her magic, she paused, trying so hard not to show any disdain for the way he’d talked about buying her. As long as her parents were threatening her family, she had to remain on good terms with them, and that meant making sure this marriage happened. She started to speak.
Well my strengths are in nature and mind mage. She was going to do some magic, but then he spoke up about wanting to go outside. She looked at her parents, then back to Tiberius and got up and followed him. She still worried about saying the wrong thing and her parents finding out, but it would at least be nice not to have them directly breathing down her neck while she jumped through hoops.
Lyric followed Tiberius, her heart pounding in her chest. She could feel the weight of her parents' gaze on her back. This was another test, another game to play. She just hoped she was up to the challenge. The back garden used to be her favourite place to play when she was little. She felt a little bit more at ease in the garden, even if she still had to carefully watch what she said, after all, the only thing that she knew about Tiberius beyond where he was from, was that he was engaged to her sister, she didn’t know if she could trust him.
So they could not be bothered to get up from the breakfast table. Tiberius spared Lyric a blank glance, mostly to confirm her position. Then he raised his hand and shadows spilled like ink over the house’s back facade, obscuring the windows and jamming the doors. It was, perhaps, the least subtle way of hiding from prying eyes – he was capable of much more delicate manipulation of light.
He was not feeling delicate. If the parents did not care to chaperone their daughter, he would take away that they’d ever had the option. He truly had no further use for their good will anyway.
“For fuck’s sake. Are you dull or merely spineless, Lyric?” Perhaps all southern mages were – as if they were trained wrong on purpose, as a joke. “We’re not out here for my love of beetles and ants. Do something.”
If she could not push back, then this whole endeavor was a waste of time. Doomed from the start. Perhaps some people enjoyed soft, biddable partners. Tiberius was not one of them. In Tevinter, she’d be eaten alive.
“Read my mind, make the damned flowers grow. Something.” He did not doubt that she was a Nicollier; she simply looked too much like her sister not to be. But he would not put it past her parents to lie about her talent.
Talent that had better be significant, to be worth the heartache every time he looked at her.
Lyric flinched at his harsh words, but she understood the challenge. Very well, she replied, her voice steady. She raised her hand, and with a few whispered words, a rose bush that had been dormant for the season suddenly bloomed, its vibrant flowers a stark contrast against the early spring chill.
Anger welled up inside of her, anger at him, anger at her parents, anger at the entire fucked up situation, the bush continued to grow, vines reaching out, slithering along the ground and intertwining around Tiberius’s legs.
If you want, I could hurt you and then show you how adept my healing magic is. Subtle sarcasm, perhaps not so subtle, but then her parents couldn’t see her at the moment so she was a bit less terrified she’d do or say the wrong thing in front of them. She just didn’t know if Tiberius was someone she could trust.
“Oh, you can do better than that, can’t you?” Any novice could handle a few flowers. What about the rest of the garden? Still, it was miles better than nothing. Tiberius recovered some small amount of his composure. He wasn’t being swindled, at least in this respect. Lyric was what she said she was.
That left the question of what, in the Archon’s name, she had been doing for the last twenty-five years. If it bothered her to be away from her prior life, right now she was giving no sign of it. Well, she was somewhat angry, perhaps — but he’d given her much cause. He watched her closely, as though getting partially devoured by a rosebush was a perfectly normal mid morning occurrence. The thorns were prickly through the leg of his trousers. Wasn’t there some kind of awful disease associated with picking roses?
The offer to demonstrate her healing magic was interesting. Perhaps not meant to be taken seriously. Tiberius shucked off his jacket and slung it over his shoulder anyway. He followed that up by unbuttoning his left cuff and rolling the sleeve up past his elbow.
“As you like. I’d have more use for that than flowers.” He offered her his bare forearm, palm up, fingers loosely clenched. Pale scars broke up his warm olive toned skin, runic shapes of magical significance cut again and again to strengthen his spells.
“Do have a care, though.” He leaned down slightly, speaking conspiratorially. “If you ruin my clothes, I’ll have to replace them. And that’s less gold for your mercenary parents to wring out of me.”
Lyric's eyes narrowed at his words, her anger simmering just under the surface. She reached out, her touch both gentle and firm, as she let her magic flow into the vines. The air around them seemed to shimmer, and for a moment, they were the only two people in the world. She took some deep breaths, trying to control her emotions. That was usually when she made mistakes with her magic, when she got upset or frightened, and right now she couldn’t afford any errors. She thought about just cutting him with her dagger she kept at her ankle, but he was interested in her magic so, she focused on the vines and made one of them grow large enough to reach up and scratch Tiberius with one of the thorns.
Then she turned her magic on Tiberius, as the vines crumped down around his feet, she focused on mending the torn skin. It was a simple enough task, and although her hands shook at one point from her iron concentration, she ultimately succeeded in closing the wound.
You may also be interested in knowing, something my parents don’t know about me, I’m also trained as an engineer rogue. I’m good with potions and not just the obvious ones, some of my own creation. You wouldn’t have had to get rid of your clothing, I have a potion that removes blood stains. She said, she hated feeling like she was on display, an object to be sold and traded, but with her family’s lives at stake, she couldn’t afford to be bashful about what she could do.
There was something to be said for keeping one’s cool under duress. It was a useful skill to have, if frustrating in the moment. He wanted a rise out of her and it was becoming clear that such a thing wasn’t in the cards today. With an open invitation to harm the target of her ire and and and– Only a sluggish rivulet of blood trickled down to his elbow, more itch than ache after the initial puncture. Not the mauling that some self-sabotaging part of himself wanted.
He watched the wound zip back up, frowning faintly at the top of her head. When she was done he slipped behind her shoulders and took her hand, gently arranging her fingers until they were splayed before her.
“Is this always how you wield your magic? Outstretched, like a snake that might bite you?” He closed her hand, moved her by the wrist– up, down. Back to neutral again. “Your chantry would teach you that, I suppose. But I’ve also met southern mages who use it like a cudgel.
“That’s … Better. But it’s not right, either. Magic is your arms and legs, Lyric. I need you to make a fist.” Tiberius curled her fingers into the proper shape and then let her go entirely. He took a folded handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at the now heavily smudged blood on his arm. Something fell out of it and rolled in the grass. Cursing softly, he bent to retrieve it. Stood, watched Lyric a moment with an unreadable expression. Finally arrived at something resembling an decision.
“Here. Wear it if you like. Like all curses it can only be given away.” His grandmother’s ring, chunky silverite set with an enormous black moissanite, the band encrusted with tiny diamonds and garnets. Tiberius placed it carefully into the center of her palm rather than on her finger.
Not wanting to see her expression, he looked back toward the house and ended his spell. The conjured shadows burned away from the windows and doors in an instant, spilling several footmen and Lyric’s father out onto the lawn.
“Please do not trouble yourself overmuch. I would not expect my wife to do laundry.”
The man was insufferable, even when she did exactly what was asked, he didn’t seem entirely pleased with it. Not that she’d been looking for an atta boy from him, but she thought to herself despite how good looking the man was, he acted a bit like he’d been sucking on a lemon. She watched as the ring fell to the ground and Tiberius picked it up.
Lyric looked at the ring in her hand, then back at him. She knew better than to refuse a gift, especially one like this. With a slight nod, she slipped the ring onto her finger. Thank you," she said, her tone neutral. She looked back at her family and the approaching footmen, preparing herself for another round of niceties and veiled threats. Her father wasn’t worried about what Tiberius had been up to, only what she may or may not have said in the time she’d had away from their gaze.
Is everything OK, we were uh…. He looked from Tiberius and back to Lyric. Lyric did her best not to roll her eyes, but she was only semi-successful. She could see the vein in her father’s forehead looked like it was going to burst. Everything is fine Emeric. Using her father’s given name instead of calling him father had been a slight slip, but then what did it matter if Tiberius was given the impression she didn’t get along with her father, she didn’t have to like her parents to go along with their plan and ensure that Lyric’s family remained safe.
That was almost enough to wound his pride – such a tepid reaction to the presentation of a priceless family heirloom! If he ever had to recount this moment, Tiberius would simply be forced to lie quite egregiously. Though he hoped she wouldn’t be foolish enough to sell it. He had not been entirely joking about the curse.
Emeric was looking between them, taking in Tiberius’ partial state of undress and the blood looking like so much more now that it was spread around everywhere. Color remained in the old man's cheeks while the rest of his face had gone pale as table salt. That was interesting. Did the Nicolliers imagine that their daughter would wish to hurt him if she could?
“Yes, yes. More than fine. Everything may proceed apace.” He could put them off until Val Royeaux freed itself from the darkspawn or succumbed to the siege. Only there was a folded broadsheet under Emeric’s arm, something he’d been reading at the breakfast table. Tiberius tilted his head to get a better look before impatiently snatching the paper away.
“It’s gone? Truly?” Hope shredded his voice, thought and emotion blending into an incomprehensible roar in his mind. Tiberius rubbed his chin, his grip on the paper turning limp and nerveless. That handful of words changed everything.
Emeric was talking. Something about how Lyric was so very precious now that they all were reunited, and that her travel from Starkhaven had cost so much. Surely he could understand how it had undue strain on the family coffers. Tiberius barely heard him until Emeric’s hand slapped down on his shoulder, with too much force to be considered entirely friendly. His unseeing gaze flicked back, focusing with barely concealed loathing on the Orlesian nobleman.
“Our deal stands as it is, Monsieur. Now, prepare your daughter for travel. I expect to leave at dawn.” Then, to Lyric with a distracted glance back. “Forgive me. I must make ready.” He continued through the house and let himself out the front door.
