Chapter 22: Dawn Conspiracy
The bathwater had long since lost its heat, but neither of them moved to get out. Steam no longer rose in ghostly tendrils; the surface was a placid, milky mirror scented with rose oil and the particular, musky scent of their exhaustion. Kerr’s back was against the carved marble, Anora between his legs, her spine pressed to his chest. Her head rested in the hollow of his shoulder, silver-gold hair dark and clinging to her wet skin and his.
His arms were loose around her middle, his big hands splayed over her stomach. The skin there was still softly creased from the twins, a landscape he traced with absent, calloused thumbs.
“They’ll find the body in a week, maybe two,” Kerr said, his voice a low rumble in his chest against her back. He wasn’t asking. He was stating a fact of the world, like the temperature of the water.
Anora shifted, just enough to dip a hand below the surface, watching the ripples distort her fingers. “Florian’s people will panic. They’ll scramble. Marcel will either be a genius for surviving or a target for whoever thinks they had a hand in it.” She let out a long, controlled breath. “It creates a vacuum. A messy, screaming one.”
“Better their backyard than ours.” He nuzzled the wet crown of her hair, breathing her in. The scent of sex and sweat was still there underneath the roses. “We need to clean our own house first. While they’re busy staring at the bloodstains in Antiva.”
She was silent for a long moment. The dawn light, weak and pale as thin ale, began to seep through the high, narrow window of the bathing chamber. It caught the edges of the copper tub, the discarded piles of their formal wear—his tunic stained with wine and something darker, her gown a pool of midnight-blue velvet on the stone floor.
“Bann Alfstanna’s new Orlesian chef,” Anora said, her tone shifting into the crisp, detached cadence of a military report. “A gift from the Comte de Montfort last spring. He’s been copying my weekly menu requests and sending them out with the laundry courier.Cipher. Basic, but effective.”
Kerr’s hands stilled on her stomach. “How long have you known?”
“Since the night Bryce had colic and I changed the order to broth and dry toast.” A faint, cold smile touched her lips. “He still sent a full report detailing ‘the Queen’s delicate stomach and potential weakness’. I’ve been feeding him pure fiction for five months. Let him tell them I’m pregnant again. Let them waste resources investigating it.”
He chuckled, a deep, tired sound. “Cruel.”
“Practical.” She tilted her head back to look at him. The dawn light carved the planes of her face, showing the faint shadows under her eyes, the sharp, calculating intelligence in them. “Then there’s the bard in the retinue of Bann Esmerelle. Too talented for a minor Bann’s court. Sings the latest Orlesian ballads before they’ve even reached the Val Royeaux taverns. She’s a plant. Probably reporting on the Bannorn’s grievances. Esmerelle is too vain to see she’s being used as a conduit.”
“You want to remove them?”
“I want to use them.” Her fingers tapped a slow rhythm on his knee beneath the water. “We purge the obvious ones, the clumsy ones. We make a show of it. Public trials, of a sort. Let the court see we’re not asleep. But the skilled ones, the buried ones… we leave them. We feed them carefully crafted truths. Let them carry our narrative back to whoever is left in Val Royeaux who can still think straight.”
Kerr considered this. He saw the logic, the elegant, brutal efficiency of it. It was a game of stones on a Wicked Grace board, and Anora was always five moves ahead. “And after our house is in order?”
Her eyes met his in the dim light. There was no softness there now, only a gleaming, avaricious ambition that matched the pulse he felt quickening against his palms. “Then we install our own presence. Not through the front door.Not with armies. That’s their game, and it’s expensive. We do it through trade. Through debt.”
She shifted, turning in the water to face him. The movement caused a small wave to slosh over the rim, onto the floor. She didn’t seem to notice. Her hands came up, resting on his shoulders. “The Ferelden Grey Company secured significant lyrium deposits in the Deep Roads expedition last year. Orlais’s templars are always hungry, always under-supplied by the Chantry. We become their supplier. At a favorable rate, of course.”
“We’d need a broker in Val Royeaux. Someone they’d trust.”
“We have one.” Her smile was razor-thin. “Bann Esmerelle’s bard. Once she understands her position is known to us, she’ll be exceptionally motivated to represent Ferelden’s mercantile interests. She’ll think she’s spying on trade negotiations for her Orlesian masters. In reality, she’ll be building our network.”
Kerr leaned back, looking at her. Water droplets clung to her lashes. He saw not just his wife, the mother of his children, but the daughter of Loghain Mac Tir. The inheritor of a will forged in occupation and liberation. “You’re talking about owning a piece of their military.”
“I’m talking about holding the leash on the dogs they set to guard their home.” Her voice dropped, intimate and fierce. “When the time comes—and it will, Kerr, maybe not for us, but for Bryce, for Elissa—they won’t see Ferelden coming as an invader. They’ll see us as the debt collector. And everyone, from the lowest chevalier to the highest grand duke, understands that language.”
The water was truly cold now, raising gooseflesh on their skin. He stood, the sudden movement a cascade of noise and displaced water. He stepped out, grabbed a thick, linen towel, and wrapped it around his waist. Then he held out a hand for her.
She took it, her own skin chilly. He pulled her out and enveloped her in a larger towel, rubbing her arms briskly. She stood still, letting him, her mind clearly still leagues away, in the salons and counting-houses of Orlais.
“Sten told me something,” Kerr said, guiding her from the bathing chamber into the relative warmth of the bedchamber. The hearth was embers, but the room held the day’s residual heat. “About the Qunari. In Kirkwall. Their Beresaad are still there. He says they don’t stay anywhere without a reason worth killing for.”
Anora paused, the towel held tight under her chin. “Kirkwall is a mess. A sewer of despair and overzealous templars. What could the Qun possibly want with it?”
“Don’t know. But if they’re digging in, something’s there. Something that matters to them.” He pulled a fresh tunic over his head. “Might be worth finding out. A problem in the Free Marches can stay a problem in the Free Marches. Or it can become a problem for everyone.”
She nodded, her hair dripping dark spots onto the rug. “One fire at a time. Orlais first. Secure the borders, secure the throne. Then we look outward.” She walked to the window, pulling aside the heavy curtain to look at the waking city below. “We have time.We have the twins. We have a country that’s finally, truly ours. We move slowly. We move carefully.”
He came up behind her, his body a wall of heat against her damp back. He rested his chin on her wet head. “Carefully,” he agreed, his voice a murmur. “But always moving forward.”
They stood there as the sun finally cleared the city walls, painting the rooftops of Denerim in pale gold. The silence was comfortable, charged not with exhaustion now, but with a shared, grim purpose. The hangings in the hall, the body in the carriage, the spies in the kitchen—they were the first, brutal strokes of a new design. A design they were drawing together in blood and cunning and cold water.
A design they were drawing together in blood and cunning and cold water.
His hands slid from her towel-clad shoulders down the length of her arms, his touch smoothing away the chill. He turned her gently from the window to face him, the dawn light now catching the flecks of silver in her blue eyes. They held the ghost of the previous night’s ruthless calculations, but also a profound, weary softness that existed only for him and the children sleeping down the hall.
“All that,” Kerr murmured, his thumbs tracing the arc of her cheekbones, “for them. Every brutal, necessary thing.” He nodded towards the nursery door. “So they never have to draw that particular map themselves.”
Anora leaned into his palm, her eyelashes fluttering closed for a second. “So they inherit a finished tapestry, not a pile of bloody thread.”
“Mmm.” He kissed her forehead, then the bridge of her nose. His lips trailed to the corner of her mouth, his voice dropping to a husky, private rumble. “Watching you with them… watching your body change, become this… incredible life-force.” He breathed her in, his words warming her skin. “It does something to me. The thought of you round with another baby, that glow you had… it’s a primal, greedy kind of excitement I can’t even explain.”
A low, involuntary moan vibrated in Anora’s throat. She tilted her head back, offering her neck to his kisses as a shiver that had nothing to do with the cold water traced her spine.
“Maker’s breath, Kerr,” she sighed, her voice thick. She pressed her body flush against the hard planes of his, the towel between them a feeble barrier. “That has absolutely no chance of seducing me with talk like that.” Her fingers dug into the muscles of his back, pulling him closer even as she spoke. “It’s transparent. It’s absurd.”
She melted into him anyway, her sarcasm dissolving into a breathless gasp as he found the sensitive spot just below her ear. Her own towel slipped, puddling at their feet on the damp rug.
“See?” she whispered, her protest a fiction her body readily betrayed. “No effect at all.”
He laughed softly against her skin, a warm, dark sound of pure victory. He lifted her then, effortlessly, her legs wrapping around his waist as he carried her the few steps to their waiting bed. The linen sheets were cool, smelling of lavender and sun.
This time was different. The frantic, sweaty urgency of the night’s earlier couplings was gone, burned away in the bathwater and their grim planning. Now, there was only a slow, deep reverence. His hands charted the new topography of her—the softer curve of her belly, the fuller swell of her breasts, the faint silver lines he kissed as if they were medals of honor.
He entered her with a gentle, inexorable slowness that drew a choked, broken sound from her lips. It was not a taking, but a joining, a silent reaffirmation in the quiet dawn. Her heels locked at the small of his back, pulling him deeper, her face buried in the column of his neck.
Their rhythm built not like a storm, but like a tide—slow, sure, overwhelming. The outside world, with its spies and corpses and distant Qunari, ceased its relentless hammering. There was only the syncopated beat of their hearts, the shared heat, the frantic whisper of skin on skin. Her climax rolled through her in a series of long, quiet waves, milking his own from him with a groan that he muffled against her hair.
For a long time afterward, they simply lay tangled, lungs heaving in the grey-gold light. The sounds of the palace beginning to stir—a distant door, the scuff of a guard’s boot in the hall—seeped back into the silence.
Kerr shifted to his side, propping his head on his hand to look at her. A satisfied, almost foolish smile played on his lips. He traced the outline of her parted lips with one finger.
Before he could speak, a thin, indignant wail pierced the quiet from the nursery. It was answered a moment later by a second, more plaintive cry.
Anora’s eyes opened. The soft, sated haze in them evaporated, replaced by instant, sharp focus. She met his gaze, and a ghost of a smile, wry and resigned, touched her own mouth.
“The future monarchs of Ferelden,” she said, her voice rough with sleep and sex, “demand an audience.”
“Duty calls,” Kerr sighed, the words heavy with a contentment that outweighed the fatigue. He rolled from the bed and began to pull on his breeches.
Anora sat up, the sheet pooling around her waist. She watched him move, her expression unreadable for a moment. The man who could snap an emperor’s neck without blinking was now trying to quietly locate a clean tunic before a baby’s cry escalated into a full-scale revolt.
“Send the wet nurse away when she comes,” Anora said, swinging her own legs out of bed. She reached for a simple linen robe. “We’ll get them ourselves this morning.”
Kerr paused, his tunic half-on. He looked at her, and his answering grin was pure, unguarded light. It was a glimpse of the younger man he’d been before the throne, before the war, before the weight of so many necessary sins.
“Yeah,” he said, his voice soft. “Alright.”