So simply he asked the question; so matter-of-fact, as if upon her explanation of events did not hinge the entirety of her rapidly dwindling future. She eyed him skeptically, not even looking at her hands as they shuffled and placed the cards now - if nothing else, she was convincing him wonderfully that ever submitting to a game of Wicked Grace with her was a very bad idea - before she dropped her eyes again and did as he asked, surprisingly without argument. She saw no harm in it, after all, and no chance of redemption, either, but if it soothed his manly little conscience....
"I was out doing some courier work for Valere than day," she said, gathering up her cards and beginning the pattern again: shuffle, lay, gather, repeat. "She was expecting me, and she always insisted I come in through her window, had insisted for years. She didn't like the idea that someone might intercept her messages if I went through the estate the normal way." Shuffle, lay, gather, shuffle, lay, gather. There was a rhythm to it along with her innate grace, a rhythm like the heartbeat of time. It smoothed some of her frayed nerves, the habit, almost with an air of ritual about it. "So I climbed into the window, and there she was on the floor, knife in her heart and all her jewelry gone. The place was an unholy mess, and I... I could tell just by looking at her that there wasn't anything I could do. I couldn't bear to touch her." Her eyes were unfocused, not looking at her cards; she was not there sitting with Ordhan, but far away, in Denerim, looking at the corpse of the only woman she had ever known as a mother. Her face was white, and her hands slowed and then stilled on the cards entirely. Oh, Valere.
There was a long pause as she relived the horror of that moment, then snapped her head to the side, shaking herself out of it. Come on, Az, focus up. "I went out into the hallway in a panic, looking for help. Lelahai was next door, with some of the King's Guard that the Queen loans the Arling. I didn't even get a chance to tell her what had happened, she just sicced the guards on me." She lifted her head again, looked Ordhan dead in the eye. On her face was an expression that never ought to have been on the visage of a young woman - jaded and hurt, the look of a soldier staring their own death in the face, not exactly bravely going to it but having little choice in the matter. "I knew if they caught me, there wouldn't be a trial. There would be no hanging and no ceremony. It would be a sword in the back." She took a breath, but did not look away from him again. "So I ran. Back out Valere's window and across the roofs. Lelahai sent up the alarm, and just about every guard in Denerim boiled out of hiding to try and catch me. I made it to one of the skybridges over the Drakon River - not much more than a couple planks of wopd nailed together, really - but there was a trap there, waiting for me. Archers, hidden on the rooftops in Archwolf district. If I were any slower, I would have been a pincushion."
She shrugged her shoulders, her hands still and tension in her frame. "So I picked the river. Came up half-drowned a few miles down the coast from Denerim, and I've been trying to keep ahead of the bounty hunters ever since."