The tavern was loud, as they always were. In Rivain, the sea brought the voices in from every direction, carrying music and spice and the dull ache of memory on the tide. Zevran sat with his back to the wall, one boot up on the edge of his chair, and a half-empty glass of something far too strong sweating in his hand. The candlelight played across the darkened gold of his skin and caught on the new grey at his temples - traitorous strands that had appeared too early, too fast.
She would be twenty today. If she was alive.
He smiled at the thought, warm and wistful, the kind of expression that could make strangers believe he was remembering a lover rather than a ghost.
The barmaid brought him another drink without being asked. He winked at her, even though he hadn't properly flirted in days. She smiled. People always did. It cost him nothing to give it. And it kept them from asking questions.
It had been ten years. Ten years of rumours and dead ends and waiting in places like this, watching the door as if she might walk through it by mistake, all wild hair and bare feet and some smart remark about how long it took him to find her.
But she never did.
He took the glass and turned it in his hands, watching the amber swirl. Twenty. Maker. She'd been ten the last time he saw her - scrawny, sharp-eyed, always barefoot no matter how many pairs of shoes he bought her. She hated them. Said they made her slower.
Zevran chuckled under his breath and tipped the drink back. It burned. Good.
He had left her in Nevarra, with an old friend in a village so small you could walk through it in the time it took to finish a song. He hadn't wanted to - he never wanted to leave her - but there was a job, something dangerous, something that would have drawn attention if he'd brought a child with him. Just for a few weeks, he'd told her. Just long enough to finish what he started. She'd hugged him, arms around his neck, and whispered a promise in his ear:
"Don't be gone too long. I'll run off if you are."
He'd laughed. Thought she was joking.
The village had been burned before he returned. No survivors. Or so they'd said.
But Zevran knew how people vanished. He knew how girls were taken - by raiders, by slavers, by men with no names and blood under their nails. The kind of men he'd spent his whole life being sent to kill.
So he hunted them. For months, then years. He tore apart bandit dens. Tortured his way through slaver chains. Slept in the mud, bled in back rooms, and lost track of how many times he thought he was close. Always empty-handed. Always just behind.
The others had helped, in the beginning. Leliana still did. Her messages came now and then - "a girl with green eyes was seen," or "a golden haired elven girl said." It never amounted to anything. Still, she kept trying. The rest… tried less. Not because they didn't care. But because they believed she was gone. He understood. He just couldn't accept it.
"You already lost her mother," Leliana had said once. "Don't lose yourself too."
But what else was there to lose?
Zevran leaned back in his chair, eyes drifting across the tavern. Sailors, thieves, merchants. All faces he didn't know. All lives he wasn't a part of. He wore his charm like armour - smiles and jokes and quick hands that still knew how to steal hearts and purses alike. But it was all a mask. It always had been.
He hadn't been whole since he lost her. He didn't even know what to imagine anymore. Was she scared? Was she angry? Had she been hurt, broken, changed? Did she think he'd abandoned her? That he hadn't come? That he'd stopped looking?
The thought of it made his throat tighten. He finished the drink. And still, he couldn't give up. Not today. Not on her birthday.
A bard was setting up near the corner, strumming a few light notes to test the tuning. Zevran barely looked up. He'd heard a thousand songs in a thousand places. The only ones worth remembering had all gone quiet years ago.
He rolled the stem of his glass between two fingers. His thoughts were on ash and old fires, on a village in Nevarra that no longer existed.
The bard started to sing. Something lilting, simple, soft enough that the room didn't go quiet - but Zevran's ears caught the first words like a hook.
"Mi estrellita…"
The name curled like smoke in the air. He blinked, the glass halfway to his lips. That - well, that was familiar. But not so rare. He wasn't the first father to call his daughter my little star, was he? It was the kind of name someone gave out of affection and poetry. No reason to-
Zevran's hand stilled midair. The bards next words struck like a blade to the chest. "Fly far." He had said that. Not once, not idly, but meaningfully - he had named her Starling so she would never feel caged. So she would always know she could run. That she could be free.
His chest tightened.
The bard kept singing, something about thorn-cut feet and wandering skies, and Zevran forgot to breathe. Starling hated shoes. She was always barefoot. The tavern didn't matter anymore. Neither did the drink. Every word the bard sang dropped like a pebble into his stomach, rippling outward until the bard sang of a gold loop.
The earring. His mind screamed it. The small gold hoop he'd given her when she was eight, after her mother died. He'd carefully put it in her ear himself.
The room could have burned down around him and he would not have noticed. His knuckles were white around the glass. His jaw locked. He didn't breathe, didn't blink. That wasn't just memory now. That was a message. A sign.
The last lines trembled on the bard's lips like a spell. Zevran stared at him - young, barely older than Starling would be now. Brown hair, well-kept, no weapons visible, a soft look about him, but with eyes too sharp to be naive. He hadn't written the song, Zevran could tell. He'd learned it. Memorised it. Carried it.
The bard sang another half dozen songs before he finished his set to scattered applause and a few half-hearted coins in his case. Zevran didn't move until the boy slipped off the edge of the makeshift stage, gathering his satchel, heading for the side door.
Then he stood. The chair scraped lightly. The crowd meant nothing. He kept the bard in his sights like a mark. He moved through the tavern with the kind of grace that made people step aside without knowing why. His hand brushed the hilt of his dagger out of habit - not as a threat, but as a promise to himself: If this is real, no one's stopping me.
Outside, the night was damp, quiet. Lanterns flickered against the misty dark. The bard moved quickly, ducking into the alley beside the tavern.
Zevran followed. He could have called out. Could have made it civil. But something inside him was trembling - too fragile for diplomacy. This was a ghost come to life. A heartbeat in the dark.
He turned into the alley in silence, and the bard stopped at the end of it, sensing the presence behind him.
Zevran spoke, voice low and steady, as always. "Where did you learn that song?"
The boy turned slowly. And Zevran saw it, then. A flicker of tension, wariness, maybe fear. Maybe guilt. Maybe recognition.
"Which song?" The bard asked, too casually.
Zevran's smile didn't reach his eyes. "The first one you sang."
The bard noticed the shift. They always did - those with good instincts, anyway. The boy's gaze dropped briefly to Zevran's hand, resting near the hilt of his dagger. Not drawn yet, but there, visible. A quiet promise.
Zevran stepped forward once, slow and deliberate. "Where did you learn it?"
The boy swallowed. His voice came fast, too fast. "From a girl. In Antiva City."
Zevran's heart slammed against his ribs. "Who?"
"She never gave me her name. Just paid me coin to add the song to my set. I - I wasn't the only one, either."
More bards. More copies. She had done this deliberately. Not a one-off message lost in the wind. She'd sown it like seed.
"What did she look like?"
The boy hesitated, then answered. "Small. Pretty. Golden hair… sort of greyish-greenish eyes? But pale. I don't know the colour exactly. They were… strange. Sharp."
Zevran's vision blurred for a breath. It was her. It had to be. His legs nearly gave under him. She would have grown - of course she would have grown - but she still sounded like his girl. His wild thing with scraped knees and bird bones, who'd been born barefoot and furious and full of cleverness.
Golden hair. Grey-green eyes. A message in a song. She remembered.
"Does she live in Antiva City?"
"I don't know," the bard said, fast again. "She never gave me an address. Just found me after a performance, handed me the lyrics and a few coins. Told me it would matter to someone."
Zevran pressed a hand to his chest without thinking. It felt like something was cracking open inside him, something he hadn't dared touch in years. A light. A warmth. A hope so sharp it bordered on pain.
"How long ago?"
"A few months. Maybe three?"
Zevran closed his eyes for a beat. Three months. She'd been alive. Not a decade ago, or in vague rumours whispered in back rooms. Recently. In Antiva. It wasn't a rumour this time. It wasn't a false lead or a misremembered girl in a slaver's cage. It wasn't bones or ash or silence.
It was her. Starling. He had not lost her. Not completely. She had survived, she had grown. She had written to him with lyrics and memory and almond trees. A message disguised as a song - but for him, unmistakable.
She had left a trail. Zevran's hand dropped from his dagger. Slowly... thoughtfully. His fingers trembled.
"Thank you," he said quietly.
The boy blinked, confused. "That's it?"
Zevran looked at him with something halfway between joy and devastation. He smiled, finally, but it was raw. "You've no idea what you've given me."
He turned without another word, cloak swirling behind him, boots silent on the cobblestones. His hands still shook. He would leave tonight. Charter would have friends in Antiva, Leliana, too.
Zevran moved fast through the fogged streets, no longer caring about wine or beds or gold. His thoughts beat faster than his footsteps. He needed a horse. A map. A list of every tavern in Antiva City with a stage and a young bard dumb enough to take coin without asking questions.
Antiva.
His stomach turned. He had avoided that place for years. Skirted its edges like a beast circling a trap. He'd gone in once, twice - slipping across the border like a ghost, chasing leads that turned up nothing but dust and a few dead men who might have known something, once. But he'd rarely dared go into the heart of it. Not into Antiva City. Not the Crows nest. Not the streets still haunted by his name.
He was still hunted, still marked. Zevran Arainai. Traitor. Escapee. Target. It had been more than a decade since he'd broken their chains, and still, he'd never fully escaped their reach. Every step into Antiva risked exposure. He'd stayed away because he'd thought it wise. Because he'd thought - never - that she could've ended up there.
He stopped at the edge of a canal bridge, breath catching. But what if she had? What if she had been there this whole time - trapped in the one place he wouldn't look too closely?
The realisation hit hard. A crack down his sternum. He leaned his hands on the cold stone and bowed his head. He had searched brothels in Nevarra. Every one he could find. Paid information dealers and former slavers. Bribed guards. Even turned over a few minor nobles whose appetites had always been too well-fed. He'd assumed that's where a girl like her - young, pretty, stolen in a raid - would be sold.
And then, when Nevarra turned up nothing, he'd worked outward. Border towns. Outposts. Places just near enough to Antiva that someone might bring stolen goods across without being foolish enough to bring them into the Crow's own backyard.
But Antiva itself? He hadn't wanted to believe it. He hadn't even considered it seriously. Not until now. She must have known that. She must have known it was the one place he wouldn't look. And she sent the song anyway. That was what gutted him the most. Not the fear - not the risk of returning to a city that wanted him dead. But the knowledge that she might have been there for years, waiting for a rescue that had never come, because he'd been too careful.
"I should have gone sooner."
He whispered it to the night. Not because anyone could hear, but because he needed to say it aloud. To own it. To feel the shame it carved into him.
Mi estrellita…
She had found a way to sing through the bars. And he hadn't even seen the cage. Not until now. Zevran straightened, the wind catching in his cloak. The bridge stretched behind him like a decision already made.
He would go to Antiva City. He would face the Crows, if he had to. Sneak through their windows, slit their throats, burn their ledgers. Whatever it took.
Because if she was there - if she was still within reach - there was nothing he wouldn't do.