#isabeth

Bethany was the only  Hawke to emerge from the hold, and that was still a bit of a surprise to Isabela. Garrett had disembarked at Highever at the same time as the gaggle of mages, though he disappeared into the crowd in the opposite direction. It still felt strange to Isabela to see him go off on some adventure without her -- without anyone  to watch his back -- but it wasn't her place to coddle or second-guess him. 

"I'm surprised you didn't go with Garrett," Isabela commented, leaning on the wheel to adjust the angle of the ship against the new wind. 

Bethany vented a short laugh, harsher than Isabela remembered her being. "Yes, he was surprised too," she said. 

Isabela didn't intend to pry but she left the silence open, inviting. After a minute of creaking sails and sighing wind, Bethany went on to say: "I've made up my mind. I don't want to follow him everywhere any more. I've spent too much of my life doing that. I need to stand on my own two feet now." Isabela nodded. "I'm sure you can, if you choose to. You've grown up a great deal." A silence fell over the deck of the ship, filled by the sounds of the sea -- scuffling of the deckhands as they went about their tasks towards the stern, the lap of the waves, the soughing of the wind. Bethany gazed at the horizon, and Isabela gazed at her. She was a treat to the eyes right now, gilded by the slanting sunlight and with the breeze lifting strands of her hair. 

The wind picked up, swirling around Bethany, the edges of her robes flapping and floating as her hair picked up behind her. Her cheeks were bright with color, and her eyes gazed hungrily at the horizon while her hands gripped the rail as though she could will herself to fly across the distance. 

Another sharp freshet swirled around Bethany, picking up a stray line and some scraps of canvas to circle around her, and Isabela cleared her throat. Bethany looked over at her, blinking, and the wind died down somewhat. 

Isabela nodded at the breezes flitting about the deck, still flirting with the canvas and carrying bright sprinkles of salt water through the air. "Is this you?" she asked. 

"Oh --" Bethany's face flushed with deeper color; she grimaced and gripped the edges of her sleeves in her hands, concentrating on something. The winds died out in moments. "Sorry about that. I just -- I don't normally let it get away from me like that." 

"No need for sorry," Isabela disagreed. A part of her instantly leapt to the calculation of how much it could be worth to an ambitious pirate captain to have a wind-summoner on board her crew, but she pushed the avaricious part of her back in her mind. Bethany wasn’t something she could just have. "I didn't know you could control winds." 

Bethany gave a self-deprecating laugh. "Control, well, control is something I'm still working on. The breezes always came, since I came into my magic in Lothering. But in Kirkwall you're always surrounded by stone walls, so there wasn't much room for the air to circulate. And in the Circle…" 

She trailed off, and Isabela nodded in sympathy. Enclosed in stone corridors, never the fresh sea breeze on her face -- she could understand. "It's not part of the approved curriculum," Bethany went on, the self-deprecating note getting stronger. "But magic is idiosyncratic. Every mage has their own little quirks, magic manifesting in unusual ways. We train to try to straighten out those quirks, stick to a standardized regimen that's well understood and controllable." "Mm," Isabela said. "Maybe not the Circles in the South. But I've heard of such things before in Rivain. You might could go there if you wanted to learn more about wind-weaving." "Rivain..." Her eyes went distant, focused again on the horizon. Not in the direction Rivain was in, but Isabela didn't correct her. Bethany shook her head. "I've never been there before. I'd stick out like a sore thumb." "That's true," Isabela allowed. 

"I'm tired of being different," Bethany said. "Alone among strangers who aren't like me." 

There was not really much to say to that. Another silence fell, Bethany gazing wistfully out on the horizon. At length she seemed to come back to herself and sighed. "Well, I can't go back to Kirkwall," she said. "And Lothering is long gone." "Maybe, but that leaves a whole wide world out there to choose from," Isabela suggested. "There's more to Ferelden than Lothering you know, and at least it would be a familiar culture. So would the Free Marches - the Amell family had connections in half a dozen cities. Then there's Orlais, big enough that anyone can get lost in." 

She hesitated, biting her tongue, before she blurted out, "Or you could always take up piracy! Sailing the seas, free of country or connections, making a name for yourself… a new horizon every day. I could always use another person on my crew, especially  a mage. And no walls, ever." "It does sound like a dream," Bethany agreed wistfully. Her face turned solemn. "But... I don't want to hurt people. Isabela chuckled. "Sweetness, a day where we don't hurt anyone is a good day for us pirates," she said. "We don't want to hurt the merchants we rob -- a good show of force and they'll realize they can't fight us, and hand over their goods without much trouble. If you kill the sheep you'll have nothing to shear next season, you know?" "That doesn't sound so bad. And yet..." She hesitated. "Fighting does still happen, doesn't it? When they don't give in smoothly. Or when the authorities come after you." "Sometimes, yes." Isabela shrugged, saw the way Bethany's eyes followed her when she did. "It's part of the life." "I'd hoped to have a life where I don't have to hurt anyone ever again," Bethany said softly, eyes dropping to stare at her feet. "Where I'm not a danger to people around me, and I don't have to be constantly -- guarded." "Is that Bethany talking, or the Circle?" Isabela said sharply. Bethany looked up at her, eyes widening, and Isabela softened her tone. "Look. You're kind, and I can't fault that. But life is hard. Pain will come, whether you seek it out or not; you have to be ready and able to defend yourself." "I guess it is the Circle talking, at least in part," Bethany admitted. "That was always... the only part of the Circle I understood. The part that promised safety."

"Rivain does have a Circle, you know, if that's what you want. It's nothing like the Gallows. Mages are respected there, they have much more freedom, they learn the wise ways and see their families as often as they like." "But it's still a Circle." Her soft brown eyes went flinty, her voice hard. "How could I ever set foot in one of those places again? Seeing what I've seen, knowing what I know? Every Circle is living under a death sentence, and it only takes one evil woman to bring the sword crashing down. It's intolerable."

For a moment, in her cadences -- the sharp anger, the conviction -- she sounded to Isabela like another mage they knew. One whom Hawke had banished from them entirely, the night that Kirkwall burned.

"So are you a revolutionary now?" Isabela asked, keeping her voice neutral. "Picking up where Anders left off?" Bethany grimaced. "Maybe. No. I can't believe that Garrett..." She huffed. "I'm not Anders. You saw him, he was more spirit than man by the end. That spirit gave him the strength to go farther than I would ever have dreamed. I don't have that strength, I can't give my whole life away like he did. But I also can't just sit back and do nothing. I want to help people, if I can. Help other people like me."

In the setting rays of the sun she seemed to glow, iron resolution turned to gold by her inherent goodness, her kindness and her belief in the best of people. The wind danced around her, delighted and captivated by her presence, each gust reaching to tug a thread from her robes, a strand of her hair, and Isabela wished that she could be one of those breezes. 

Bethany was so, so beautiful and Isabela wanted to catch her and keep her, steal her and wear her like she would any other shiny and beautiful and valuable thing. But she can't, she won't, because she'd been kept  before, like a jewel in someone else's setting, and she vowed she would never inflict that on another woman.

So she opened her mouth with all the courage it took to turn back from Ostwick with the book in hand and said: "Well, when you figure out where you want to go, just say the word, and I'll take you there."

Bethany was quiet for a moment, stealing little peeks at her, before she finally turned away from the rail and crossed her arms with a huff. "Aren't you going to flirt with me again?" she asked.

Isabela blinked. "Say what?"

"You always used to," Bethany said, a faintly disgruntled expression on her face that looked ridiculously cute on her. "I learned a lot in the Circle, about... flirting. I was waiting for you to start doing it again so that I could flirt back, but now I don't know what to think." Her voice went small. "Have a few years in the Circle made me so ugly to you?"

Isabela couldn't help it. She snorted a laugh, because in that moment Bethany sounded so melodramatic, so full of angst that she could have been auditioning as Fenris. "All right, that's ridiculous," she said. "Sorry, sorry. But how in the Maker's name could being in the Circle make a beautiful woman ugly?"

Bethany wasn't laughing. Actually, she looked more wounded by Isabela's response than Isabela could have guessed, and a stab of guilt like a blade to the chest stopped her from chuckling. Not a joke, not this, not to Bethany. "Or did the Circle make you feel  like you were ugly?"

 She looked away. But Isabela thought she could fill it in, if she tried to put herself in Bethany's shoes: six years surrounded by Templars who hated you, being constantly told how wretched you were, told that you were one of those responsible for the fault of all mankind. Six years of being told you were a monster.

 It filled her with a simmering rage from her boots up her spine to the crown of her head; and in that moment she only wished that Anders had blown up the Templar hall, instead.

 She stepped forward across the deck to put her hands on Bethany's arms, drawing the younger woman's attention to her with a shocked gasp. "They told you that so they could control you," Isabela said, low and fierce. "They tried to make you feel like no one would ever love you so that you'd have nowhere to go, no one to turn to. Don't you ever believe that, Bethany. Don't you ever believe that no one could love you. Because you are so, so beautiful, and so  full of things to love."

Bethany gave a grin -- shaky, but real, and said with a gasp: "See, that's more what I expected!" The smile faded, not disappearing but turning into something shyer, sweeter. "Do you -- really think so?"

Isabela cocked her head to the side. "Do you think I would lie to someone just to seduce them?" she said softly.

Slowly, Bethany shook her head. "No..." she said, almost inaudible over the wash of wind and waves. "No that doesn't sound like you."

She stood there with her face turned up towards Isabela and it was so, so easy to cross the last few inches, to bring her mouth down to Bethany's in a kiss. Bethany tasted like the sea salt, like sweet water, and an elusive taste that Isabela couldn't quite pin down -- if she had to describe it, she thought she would say she was tasting the wind.

Bethany kissed back, shyly, but sure of what she wanted. They leaned together, letting the rocking of the boat on the waves guide their motion. 

At last they broke the kiss and Isabela tipped her head back, grinned down at Bethany. "So," she purred. "You learned a lot about flirting in the circle, hmm?"

"They had a lot of books," Bethany said. "Like, a lot of books."

Isabela laughed. "Well, I've never been one for books," she said, and let her smile slide towards something more like a leer. "I've always found that the best way to learn is by doing." 

She gave the word a lecherous spin and was delighted that Bethany didn't recoil; if anything her eyes just went darker, she leaned back up against Isabela with her mouth half-open as if seeking to drink her in.

"Then let's learn," Bethany murmured. 

There wasn't a lot of space on a ship for two women to find some privacy, let alone enough space in a cosy room with a real bed to discover one another. But a captain's rank had its privileges.