Northstar Vale a grin as sharp as a knife (mtr.)

Let him speak;
her eyes are she does not now have the nerve to again part her lips and quiet the warlord’s meandering musings. He jests of place names; wonders wry of epiphanies and figments; again waxes faux apologetic of his ineptitude as minstrel, storyweaver. He tells her that his mother was the songstress of his life, then, and though wilted as she was an enquiry of her own perches upon her shorn lips ... it is his own that croaks first, and so Andraste unfurls heavied lashes; ponders.

In tones deepened with drowsy dramatics  (for his sake):  “Wrath and ruin. Risk,”  heeding his pestering with movements made to rest her upon elbows; to study nearer the make of Wintersbane with fogged halfsights to linger o’er froreglim of his,  “risk and peril.”  Pleasure and possibility, the broken creature churrs within her breast  —  but she fears and dreads this thing that has come to loom and linger from the depths of a bleeding bosom.

She would not now become her brother.