Huge thanks to the sweet and talented Decantate, for the beta.

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dark

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It was springtime in Val Royeaux, a balmy night with topnotes of freesia and pressed wine, and Duncan was not hungry for the first time in months. The guards were generous with food, at least, and he was grateful. He was seventeen years old, and in the morning he would hang for murder.

Warden-Commander Genevieve came to him with an offer of salvation, but he remembered the Warden that he'd killed, the way his eyes had begged for death, and Duncan thought he'd rather hang. He said no.

She didn't listen. She saved him from the gallows and it didn't seem right to be angry about that, but he was. He wondered if his conscription was a sort of vengeance, but Genevieve was not vengeful. She was not anything absolute, just a rough sketch of a woman, drawn in shades of grey.

The elf with the mouse-brown hair watched him with mournful eyes, her irises so dark that he could not find her pupils. She told him her name was Fiona but didn't let him tell her his. "It will only make it harder if you don't..." The words trailed off. "Tell me after the Joining."

Her voice was sharp as pins as she stammered through the ritual. A tiny slip of a mage, Fiona hid inside a chainmail tunic and gripped her staff as though she might fall if she let go. Duncan imagined what it would be like to kiss her.

Genevieve handed him the chalice and he drank.

In the darkness he felt Fiona's eyes on him, and when he opened his eyes she smiled. "You survived your Joining," she said, but he could feel it burning in his veins and was not sure that he had. He was seventeen years old, and he had been executed.

Fiona was still watching him. She asked him for his name.

"It's Duncan," he said, but his voice didn't sound like his own anymore.