CHAPTER ONE
Pumpkins
Children's laughter threaded through the fall air, wrapping itself around the barn as a trio of Cullen's nieces chased after his only nephew who carried a stick covered in ribbons. Orange and black tendrils trailed in his wake as he kept slowing down for the girls to get near but not enough for them to catch him. Lana chuckled at the antics as they passed by for a third time, none of them showing any sign of slowing. She leaned back from the bowl in her lap and scooted across the tarps tossed upon the wood floor. Despite the creeping chill of autumn, a warm sun beamed down upon them, the rays powerful enough she dressed only in a light dress that blended her in with the other farming families filling the land. Her cane rested a few feet away within easy reach, but for the moment she only had need of the knife clutched in her husband's fingers.
With his tongue pinned between teeth, Cullen drove the blade deep into the flesh of a green and yellow star shaped gourd. Sawing with the same deadly focus he'd spend upon the march of armies, he augured a hand sized hole into the top of the gourd and then pried it off. Strings of elongated squash fibers stretched from the top, back inside the vegetable. Without any care, Cullen sliced the innards off the top with his knife, then scooped a massive handful out with his hand.
"We're supposed to save the seeds," Lana spoke, her eyes upon her own pile of gourds she was supposed to be preparing. It was not going as well.
The tongue slid back into his mouth, and those honey eyes lifted from his prize to try and find hers. With exaggerated movements, he plopped his fistful of guts into the pail. "I know," Cullen insisted, as if he hadn't intended to toss another pile to the mabari resting a few feet away, her tail thumping in anticipation.
"Mia was insistent about planting another crop. And she said something about roasting the remainder?" Lana cast an eye over at him, uncertain of the proposal.
He chuckled at her unease and placed a hand on her knee, the fingers still coated in gourd guts. "Don't worry, they're rather tasty once seasoning's added." His eyes darted down to her leg now slimy with the squash's strings. "Oh, sorry, I...uh..."
Carefully, Lana plucked up a pile of the guts from her own barely carved squash, leaned over, and dropped it onto Cullen's hair. Orange streaked through his sandy locks, dripping down his cheeks as he laughed. "I suppose I deserved that."
Lana wiped her fingers off on the tarp below her, "Not really."
Smiling wide at her response, Cullen scooted forward and, with his gut covered fingers scooped along her jaw, pulled her in for a kiss soft as a sunflower's petals. He was so achingly handsome by the hazy autumn light, dressed nonchalant in mended and patched breeches as well as a simple checked shirt she didn't care about the squash juice sticking to her skin.
"I love you," he sighed, tugging his hand around her waist and trying to scoot her closer for a hug. She wanted to give into his machinations but she had business to accomplish, even if it wasn't going very well. Cullen paused in his attempts to snuggle her tight to him and gestured at the gourd in between her legs.
While he had the good sense to carve a gaping hole in his, allowing easy access to scrape away the innards, Lana began with one so small her hand barely fit inside. Sighing, she admitted, "I'm afraid I'm not very good at this."
"Nonsense," he stuck up for her despite the evidence, "you've got the top off, and already scooped out most of the..." Cullen pulled up her pumpkin and placed it in his lap to inspect. "Okay, more of this needs to come out before the carving can begin."
"There's more carving?" Lana tried to glance around at the other gourds lined up around the barn in anticipation of something but Cullen caught her chin again.
"Here," he plopped his own cleaned off gourd into her lap, "you take mine while I finish yours off." After passing her a paring knife, he gestured to a turnip resting on the lip of the windowsill. "See that? You carve a little hole so you can slip a candle inside."
"Why?" she asked while rotating the knife around and attempting to stab deep into the green squash's skin.
"To create a lantern," he smiled, already having cleared out the guts Lana missed. Pulling a dagger off the sheathe around his waist, Cullen began to expertly slice into the pumpkin's skin.
"I don't understand, are there not already lanterns around?" she struggled. A few memories of celebrating something for the fall solstice rattled in her memory as a child, but nothing this elaborate. And the tower would never have let so many mages hold knives at once.
"It's tradition," he didn't explain. With the back of his hand, Cullen wiped sweat off his brow, leaving more orange guts in its wake. "Normally the children do this, but..." he whipped his head around trying to follow the fifth lap of the barn, "they seem preoccupied."
"You like this," Lana smiled. Every Satinalia he grumbled through the high traditions adopted from Orlais, Wintersend got a begrudging omelette or two, and he all but holed himself away for First Day, but something in this autumn celebration brought out the ecstatic Ferelden boy hidden beneath layers of duty. They'd only arrived a day ago, having been swamped at their abbey, leaving Cullen sniping at nearly everything in sight. But at the first apple bite, his forehead furrows lifted, he smiled serenely to himself, and a twinkle Lana once thought only she saw sparkled in his eyes.
"It's..." Cullen gestured at the piles of dead squash, "it reminds me of days on the farm. Not the bad ones, but...you finish harvest. You've got everything picked, jarred, put up for winter, so it's time to relax. Celebrate."
"Maker," Lana gasped, touching her chest in feigned shock, "I thought you were allergic to that word."
A sliver of a scowling eye shifted over her, but he shook most of it off, her light jabbing doing nothing to shift away his joy. In truth, she could understand. Nearly everyone in the Rutherford family was all smiles as the hint of winter sundered the unbearable embrace of summer. With the changing of the colors across the forests of the Hinterlands, it looked as if the Maker himself pulled out a paintbrush and washed thedas is a cozy autumn watercolor. All she needed was a cup of cider, an overstuffed chair, and a quilt to fall fully into autumn's song.
Too bad there was still this squash to deal with. Rolling the knife in her fingers, Lana tried to eye up the gourd. Her husband was gone into his own world, his eyes drilling through the pumpkin's skin as he pricked small sections of the flesh free and scattered them behind. Sensing an opportunity, Honor scooted closer, her pink and black tongue lapping up each pumpkin piece before her master thought to stop her.
A good dozen turnips sat along the windowsill, each of them baring not just a hole to let the light out, but another two slots above as if giving a face to the vegetable. "Cullen," she began before getting no response. Flicking a solitary squash seed at him, he finally broke and focused his honey eyes upon her. "Why are there faces?"
"Oh, it's..."
"Do not say tradition," she warned, waving her tiny knife in the air in a vague threat.
"Very well." He rolled back the word perched on his tongue and tried again, "You can carve whatever you like. Some do faces, it's easiest for the children. Or, perhaps a symbol."
Lana paused in her surveying the piles of finished turnips and other various squash to side eye her husband. "Let me guess, you'd carve the templar emblem as a child."
"On one or two occasions, perhaps..." Cullen admitted, a blush rising up his cheeks.
"Don't let his modesty fool you," Mia stepped into the barn through the side door leading towards the house. Cullen and Lana had been staring out the open barn doors themselves, watching the few chickens dig out insects to fatten up on. Lana tried to turn to face Mia while Cullen began to stand up to assist his sister. She waved both back to their jobs, and hefted a small straw bale up off the ground. "He used to cover
the entire farm in turnips baring the flaming sword before they finally accepted him."
"I did nothing of the sort," Cullen huffed.
"As you say, brother," Mia rolled her eyes at him, and behind his back whispered to Lana, "everywhere." A red and gold sweater covered her chest, as it did the rest of her immediate family, while Branson's were in a green and tan one. Lana wondered if there wasn't some color coding system they were supposed to undertake for this gathering, but Cullen waved it away as 'Mia learned knitting and took it to extremes.' Even still, it churned her stomach to be so drawn out from the family.
"How are you two getting on?" Mia cast a curious eye over their piles of seeded guts and the few disemboweled squash. She shared the exact same furrowed brow of her brother, both of them in fact. It seemed to be a Rutherford trait. Where Cullen had sandy hair, hers dipped deeper into an almost dirty blonde, which she always had tied up under a flour sack dotted with hand prints. Never to be caught unawares, Mia wore a belt of her own design that seemed to have attached to it anything necessary at that moment in time. Lana wondered to herself if it was magic that gave Mia such premonition to know what would be required. Taking a pair of scissors off her belt, Mia slit apart a string tying together a pile of wires.
"We're going to be setting up the bobbing tank soon," she said while gathering the metal wire in her hand.
"The what?" Lana glanced an eye at Cullen and she'd swear an ornery smile knotted up his lips, but no. That was impossible, not the man she married. He was always serious.
Smiling to himself, Cullen suddenly sat up and shouted over his shoulder, "Mi, what was your plan with all of these?"
"To make lanterns. Maker, you grow thicker every year."
"Hilarious as always," he deadpanned, now flipping around. "Turnips of course, but by the Maker, how shall I slip a wire through a pumpkin of all things to make a handle? It will slide clean off."
With a well practiced hand, Mia passed him the wires and shrugged, "I'm certain the fabled Commander of the Inquisition will find a solution. After you wash up here, we're all behind the house." Still wearing her smirk, she stepped back out of the barn with her straw bales slung across her shoulders.
Cullen grumbled as he flexed apart the wires, "This will never work." A strong hand and careful eye impaled a pointy stick through the head of a turnip, boring it fully through before he ran a wire across it and twisted the top to form a handle. Proud of his accomplishment, he swung it at Lana as if it explained anything about why it was common to cut up vegetables and then light them on fire. Placing the turnip alongside the others he'd already managed to dice faces into, Cullen picked up his blade then glanced over at her. "What are you carving into yours?"
"I have no idea..." she said, still rolling the green squash back and forth in her hands. The face felt strange, and...in the back of her mind she couldn't escape the idea of it being blood magic. The use of an effigy which could stand in place of a victim certainly counted. No, Lana shook her head, feeling her expanding curls whip against her ear. Absently, she moved to stuff them back from her face, but Cullen beat her to it. The intoxicating warmth of his skin enveloped her cheek, and she cupped his hand tighter to her before releasing him.
"I hate this stage of regrowth," Lana complained.
"You could always cut it back..." he began, continuously offering that suggestion every time she whined about her hair.
"That would defeat the purpose of growing it back. I don't want, I'd like to have it healthy and full again."
Jabbing his knife into the lid of his pumpkin, Cullen turned to wrap both of his hands around her cheeks. That amber gaze burned but a snippet of shame kept her from looking fully into it. "Lana, long hair, short, curly, bald..." he snickered at the familiar sentiment she once repeated to him, "you're lovely, no matter what."
She couldn't fight the smile lifting her lips even as she dove for his in a kiss. Not expecting it, Cullen failed to turn his head to the side, their noses bumping and his easily winning that challenge. In apology, he pressed his lips to the tip of hers, and then kissed her once more, properly this time. "And you are too sweet for words, you know that?" Lana struggled to explain her heart. It'd been nearly the whole summer and she'd still start upon the realization that he was her husband. That any of it ever happened seemed beyond the realm of belief.
"We should, um," Cullen coughed in his throat, his eyes darting down at the pithed gourds, "return to our duties before Mia gives us another cross look." Despite his proclamation, his hands remained around Lana's cheeks, and she caught his eyes darting down her neck towards her birthmark and then lower still.
"As you say, Commander," Lana smiled and he finally released his hold on her. While Cullen yanked up his knife and began another delicate section of whatever he was doing, Lana twisted her gourd around and an idea struck her. Before she put blade to its flesh, she smiled, "We could always maul each other later in the hayloft."
Starting from her lackadaisical tone, Cullen's blade skidded across the pumpkin's skin and flew through the air before bouncing into the seed bucket. Too sweet for words, by miles, Lana snickered as she finally decided on what to carve into her pumpkin. It wasn't an easy choice, and maybe she should have put a few triangles in it and called it good. When her legs began to cramp up, and her husband finished stringing wires through the rest of the turnips, she finally put down her blade in retreat.
"Are you done?" Cullen asked, glancing over. He'd kept an eye on the shadows slipping further down the dirt path as the sun swung towards afternoon. Lana nodded, her fingers wiping away the excess gourd flesh to try and reveal her carved design. "Can I see it?" he continued.
"Only if you show me yours first," Lana insisted, holding her little bit of art close to her chest.
A dangerous chuckle rumbled in Cullen's throat and he whispered to her ear, "I believe that was what led to us being caught in the belfry at the Val Royeaux chapel." Screwing her eyes up tight from both the shameful burn of the memory as well as the lustful one, Lana could only snicker with him. "Very well," Cullen spun his pumpkin around to show her. "I admit for as terrible a lantern as it will make it was far easier to carve than a turnip."
"Cullen, it's..." Far more intricate than anything she'd thought possible, he'd chiseled a near perfect replica of an orange mabari standing at attention, the thicker pumpkin flesh providing shadows. He'd even gotten spots of kaddis across the back and a little collar. "Beautiful," Lana gasped, her finger running across the squishy and tender flesh.
"It's a mabari on point," he needlessly explained, as if it wasn't an exact likeness except in orange and made out of a squash. "All right, now yours."
"No," Lana shook her head back and forth beyond embarrassed now. Hurling her squash through the air so it'd splatter into pieces seemed preferable to him seeing it. To anyone seeing it.
"Come now, I'm certain it's..." with a finger, he gripped to the squash's flesh and rotated it in her hands. Lana let him, her face scrunched up in anticipation of the look he'd give her. "I, uh..." Cullen pulled it fully out of her hands now and tried to juggle it towards the sunlight, as if that would somehow improve it.
"It's a griffin," Lana interrupted him before he started guessing. "Two griffins. The grey warden griffins. I thought I could carve it freehand, but the wings sort of drooped down and made a big sploosh and then the beaks broke and I had to, uh..."
"It's perfect," he smiled at her and she growled.
"It's a big messy blob. No, two messy blobs conjoined at the blobby hip," Lana gestured at her poor attempt at her first carved squash.
Smoothing back her hair, he scooped his arm around the small of her back, pulling Lana's head to his shoulder. She thought about resisting, feeling foolish as he comforted her like a child, but when her cheek graced his chest she cuddled into him. The familiar weight of his chin dug into the top of her head and Cullen whispered, "I will give you the blobby hip bit, but that doesn't matter. You carved your first ever lantern, and
the hole's certainly generous enough to part light. It's perfect for that. How I will get it on the wire however..."
His own failings brought a grin to Lana's dour face. She wrapped her arms around him, straining to hug him as tight as he held her. As if he sensed her earlier plans to destroy the squash, Cullen lifted it higher but he was right. It was her first lantern and it would do whatever it was supposed to. Lana sighed as his lips pressed against her forehead, and Cullen whispered, "We should go find the others."
"For this tank thing?"
"Trust me," he placed her gourd beside his mabari pumpkin and then enveloped her in a full hug, "I think you're going to like this next part."