Kallian was by the fire in camp, using the light to mend a torn shirt with uninspired but passable skill. Zevran came by a little after dinner, when the others were milling about on various business, some gone to their tents and the night warm enough to make the fire sparsely attended. "Might I have a minute of your time, oh delicate flower of the slaughterhouse?" he said, folding onto a nearby log as if she'd already said yes.
"You're going to need more than a minute if you keep larding on titles like that," she said absently, inspecting the first inch of stitching. "If this is about the Archdemon, I still don't know if it prefers men or women."
"Ah," Zevran said brightly, "no need to trouble yourself further on that. I believe I've worked out the answer, but I will save it for Alistair's deliciously virgin ears. No, my query this time is about you-specifically, about why my history with the Crows doesn't trouble you at all." Her eyes flicked up, but he kept going. "Alistair makes surly little jokes whenever I bring up the more practical aspects of my education; Morrigan sneers but basically agrees, and secretly desires me for my body; Sten treats me like a particularly unsightly bit of rash, and so on. You just look at me, say nothing, and then make plans in a fashion that suggests you at least occasionally listen to what I have said. It is puzzling."
By the end of the explanation, which he had delivered with little flourishes of ticked-off points on his fingers, she was staring at him blankly. "Why are we having this conversation?" was what came out of her mouth after a few seconds.
Zevran spread his hands in a little shrug. "I just said, gentle harbinger of broken bones and wailing. Has your hearing perhaps been affected by a recent head blow?"
"No, I mean, why are we having this conversation? Is all of this Antivan for 'let's go investigate my cock'?"
He laughed. "Have you learned nothing of my culture? That is all one can say in Antivan. Only a few true poets of the language can also express 'I have deeply enjoyed the company of your mother'."
Kallian was still snickering when Alistair walked by and gave them both a quizzical look, and when the Templar had passed her eyes followed him guiltily for a few seconds. When she looked back to Zevran, he had one brow arched and a faintly knowing expression on his face that irritated her unreasonably. "You were about to explain yourself," he prompted.
She shrugged, flicking aside one perpetually-escaping strand of auburn hair as she looked back down to her stitching. "Would you believe me if I said it was an elf thing?"
His eyeroll was practically audible. "If your evasions on the battlefield are as skillful, it is fortunate that you wear so much armor. But I can see that your mind is elsewhere. Perhaps you would prefer to talk about Alistair, and the soulful looks he casts your way when he thinks no one is watching?"
Her eyes narrowed and she jabbed the needle in unnecessarily hard, suddenly out of patience. "I thought one of the nice things about us sleeping together sometimes was that we don't feel the need to have lots of personal conversations."
A moment after she'd said it she could have kicked herself, but the words were out. The change in his face was so tiny she might have imagined it, just a slight lift of the brows and a hint of distance in the always-mocking eyes-which, she realized belatedly, hadn't been so mocking this time. His tone was as light as ever as he said, "A mutually satisfactory arrangement, to be sure. Far be it from me to sour such an amiable state of affairs. Oghren! You are off to town, are you not? I can smell the delicate reek of pre-revel about you." The last was called to the dwarf whose form could just be made out crossing camp on the other side of the fire.
"Pre-what? No, that's whiskey and man-funk. Drives the ladies wild," Oghren confided at a volume discreet enough to possibly forewarn the nearby settlement as he ambled closer.
Zevran was already on his feet and going to meet the dwarf, though he did carefully draw on his gloves before clapping Oghren on the shoulder. "My friend, your efforts are vigorous but sadly untutored-I will show you how these things are done. I fear that your dwarven appendages may be too short and stout for the occasion, however."
Mercifully the rest of the conversation was inaudible as they strolled off. Kallian stared after them for a minute, trying to shake off a gnawing sense of guilt.
It was a few nights and a number of miles later, camp pitched in the lee of a hill, when she came by where Zevran lounged by the fire and dropped a cloth-wrapped bundle next to him with a little thunk. He slanted his eyes sideways at it but didn't move, looking as comfortable as a cat by a brick oven. "Is this for me?"
Kallian hadn't actually figured out what to say when she delivered it, and had given up after a few tries. As usual, mild sarcasm was a good backup plan: "They do have presents in Antiva, don't they?"
His eyes widened in exaggerated recognition, and he sat up to reach for it with a hint of a smirk. "Perhaps in the confusion of battle, you have mixed up elements of my tragic origin. It is my aggression which is commonly purchased, not my affections."
"Forget it," she snapped, and went off to play with the dog.
A few minutes later, she was halfway into a good sullen mood when she heard him approaching behind her. She could tell by the light but deliberate rhythm of his steps, one of the tiny signals that said he was trying to be nice. Zevran didn't make noise when he walked unless he wanted to. "Wherever did you find Antivan leather boots?" he asked, as he dropped to his haunches a short distance from the dog. Elven and canine males eyed each other for a moment before deciding to leave well enough alone.
"Wasn't easy," she admitted, still inspecting a healing cut on the dog's shoulder but not bothering to hide the upward twitch at the corners of her mouth. "You can tell me later why you like the damn things so much." After a moment of hesitation she added, "Friends again?"
"Friends again," he agreed.
He didn't push, and she somehow knew that he'd stay in companionable silence until they returned to the main camp unless she broke it. For some reason, that was enough to prod her conscience back to the cause of their prior conversation. "The assassin thing," she said finally. "You really want to know?" The dog growled as she probed at a tender spot, and she thumped him lightly between the ears. He lolled out his tongue, silently laughing at her for pretending he could possibly feel that through his skull.
"I admit some curiosity," Zevran said easily. "It is the lure of the unknown-though you are endlessly prying at our motives and histories, you are very close-mouthed on the subject of your own. So far as I have seen, you yield little even to Leliana's confidential girl talk or Wynne's grandmotherly charm."
"Do you actually find it charming?" she asked with raised brows, deciding to ignore the question of how often he eavesdropped on the girl talk.
He shrugged. "Not particularly, no. Never having known my grandmother, perhaps the appeal is lost on me. But she does have an admirably firm-"
"Thank you," Kallian interrupted, leaving off her medical inspection and slouching back against the base of a tree. The dog flopped his head down on her lap, neatly pinning her there for the duration. She wanted to ask again why Zevran really wanted to know, and held off only because this time she realized it was somehow as personal a question to him as the ones she avoided answering.
After a long minute she said, "It's like this-I don't really like it that you're an assassin. I just don't feel that... it's not my job to judge, that's all. We do a lot of killing, all of us."
"At the risk of being insensitive to darkspawn feelings," he pointed out, "I believe it is commonly held that they don't count."
That wasn't exactly true, since she'd known relatively little of the sword when she started. Now, after the brutally efficient schooling of constant skirmishes and training, she had become accustomed to an appalling degree of bloodshed. But in another sense he was right. "It's because of something that happened at the alienage," she said after another short pause. Zevran, in one of his occasional shows of discretion, remained silent and studiously concentrated on polishing the detail work on his new boots.
"There was going to be a wedding," she continued. "But the arl's son and several of his friends showed up, looking for women. A few of us were taken to his estate." She didn't look at Zevran now, since if she saw anything remotely resembling pity on his face, she'd never be able to finish.
"I don't mean to make it sound like a great catastrophe. I mean, it was, but everyone I know has a brother who spilled soup on someone and can't see out of one eye, or a cousin who was goaded into a fight with some human drunks and never came home, or a friend who doesn't tell her husband about the time the master's son stopped by the kitchen for a nip of knife-ear before bed. Everyone has those stories, so there's no point in talking about them-only some of us get angry. My mother was one of those, maybe I got it from her." She found herself speaking to the dog, who was gazing up at her with soulful and patient disinterest.
"What did you do?" Zevran asked when her pause stretched out into a stall. He didn't say what happened to you? as most people would have, and in some way Kallian couldn't quite explain, that he knew to make the distinction was part of why they were friends.
She shrugged, still scratching the dog's ears. "I-we got lucky. I was able to grab a weapon, we broke free, and then we went through the house trying to find where they'd taken my cousin Shianni. And I killed every person I laid eyes on, except for the servants who ran from us. Bedrooms, storerooms, everywhere. I... if we'd gone faster, tried to avoid fights, maybe we'd have arrived before anything happened to her. She doesn't hold it against me, I think." Her voice was soft, eyes distant now and hand stilled on the Mabari's neck.
"I've thought about it often since then-trying to remember exactly what was going through my head, wondering if the same thing would happen if I had the chance to do it over. In the end, I realized that I just didn't know the answers. And I've had to make so many life-or-death decisions between then and now, most of the time it doesn't seem to matter. But... sometimes there aren't any villages or victories hanging in the balance; sometimes it's just about one person and what I think their life is worth. And when that happens, I remember the alienage, and I think that there are things hidden in people's hearts that I don't know. And I decide to believe in second chances."
She was smiling a little, strange and almost sad, as she refocused her eyes on Zevran and tilted her head a bit to the side. "That's the best I can do for an answer, so if it isn't good enough, there's nothing left but witty banter and a roll in the sack."
Zevran had finished pulling on his new boots, inspecting them with smug satisfaction while he toyed with the little braids in his hair. "I was trying for an admission that you keep me around for my devastating wit and sexual prowess. In the future I will torment you with personal questions at my own peril." To forestall the gathering frown on her face, he looked up, teeth flashing suddenly in a brilliant smile. "I think that you are a strange one, Gray Warden. But I would not lay odds that any normal woman could hold such a... colorful group together. Sometimes, you remind me of other strange souls I have known, and..."
At that moment the Mabari hound lifted his head with a happy whuf, and half a second later he lurched up to bound off toward the fire. Kallian barely had time to wince before Alistair's voice carried to them. "No, get away, that's my laund-bad dog! Get your own smallclothes! Kalliiiaaaaaann!"
"Ah, well. I will miss our talks," Zevran said quietly, lost in the noise of the dog's barking and the Warden swearing as she climbed to her feet.
"What?" she asked, looking back in distraction.
"Nothing. By all means, fair maiden of the killing fields, go and attempt to explain to your adorably ferocious hound that Templars are more pleasing to eye and nose when they have not been gnawed." As she moved off still grumbling through the trees, and he heard the first warm echo of her laugh at Alistair, Zevran leaned back to regard the stars philosophically. It had been a nice fling while it lasted; he wondered if she knew it would be over soon. He found himself hoping they would still be friends afterward.