9.
Tamlen whistled once, a loud and piercing trill, then gestured roughly for Alistair, Jacinta and Leliana to fall in line behind him. Answering trills whipped through the trees as the outflung Dalish responded to his message and passed it along. Zevran, subdued, walked by Tamlen's side. The scout briefly rested a hand on the young boy's shoulder, though his own broad shoulders were tense beneath the light, flexible armor he wore.
"You'll be fine," Tamlen said softly to the boy. Jacinta perked her ears up. "Hold your head high and speak truth. We don't want to lose anyone else."
"I'm glad I got to kill the beast, anyway," Zevran said fiercely. He peeked back over his shoulder at Jacinta with unabashed curiosity. Jacinta gave him a quick smile, and he grinned back before tilting his head back up at Tamlen. His voice was quiet, but Jacinta could still hear him. "But how did the lady know about Idris?"
"I don't know, monster. Just do me a favor and time your next escape attempt a little better, all right?"
Zevran snorted. Shortly, twining lanterns began to line a sort of path through the wood, and then they were at the entrance to the camp. The two guards there greeted Zevran warmly, which made the young elf twitch. But Tamlen and the guards quickly fell into a fast-paced conversation, Tamlen making a few aggravated gestures in response to the cragglement and skepticism with which he was met. Zevran crossed his arms, looking about to run again.
Jacinta watched the interplay worriedly, unwilling to interfere and blow their chances, desperately afraid that Tamlen would change his mind, kick them out and wash his hands of them. She didn't know where else to find a Dalish clan. At this point, she was beginning to reconsider the wisdom of seeking this encampment at all. But her dreams had been so clear, so sharp – Tamlen's pain had pulled hard at her heart – she'd been so sure they were headed in the right direction.
"Friendly lot, aren't they?" Alistair commented sotto voce.
"We have our reasons," Jacinta began, half-heartedly. But she fell silent, not wishing to make the typical Dalish excuses. The group at the entrance was clearly arguing over whether or not to admit her group at all. To come so far, to come through so much, only to be deemed unworthy, somehow not Dalish enough – she wanted to scream. "I wonder if they're aware that the tattoo on my cheek doesn't wash off," she muttered.
Leliana said softly, "It must be strange, no? To return after so long."
Jacinta nodded, her throat tight. "Surpassingly," she said. Though the Dalish elves shared a common culture, each tribe expressed it differently. The aravels of this clan, visible from here, were carved and painted differently; their faces were tattooed in a style unfamiliar to her. But the most salient difference of all was that she knew no one, and no one was happy to see her. She had returned indeed — to a home that wasn't hers.
"You look like you want to blast them out of the way and push on through," Alistair remarked. Jacinta blinked at him, and he nodded towards her staff with raised eyebrows.
She hadn't even realized how hard she was clenching the delicate instrument, but snorted at his spot-on observation, relaxing her grip. "I almost do," she admitted. "But I don't want to start off on that foot."
"Do you really think they'll let us in?" he asked her seriously.
"I think Tamlen's fighting for it."
"And if they don't?" he pressed.
"Then we'll leave." She wondered if she looked as miserable as she felt, saying that. "Like I said, we have our reasons to mistrust outsiders. Maker, it's just..."
"Zevran!"
The increasing tension broke, as everyone turned at that cry. The young runaway himself, who had hunched by Tamlen's side as though the scout was the only thing keeping him from bolting, jumped. "Mamma?"
An elf woman who looked more like Zevran's sister than his mother fell to her knees in front of the boy and gathered him in her arms, heedless of the dirt or their audience. Thick waves of sun-gold hair shone down her back as she buried her face in her son's shoulder. One of the guards, standing by, rolled his eyes in brief editorial. Zevran flushed, patting his mother's back awkwardly.
"Mamma, please, I am fine..."
"Don't you ever," said the woman fiercely, pulling away to grasp her boy by the shoulders and stare him in the eyes. "Don't you ever do that to me again! Do you know what I went through? What we went through?"
"You did the same thing!" Zevran protested. "You ran away too!"
The woman blanched beneath her sun-browned skin. Her eyes were canted upwards, as golden as her son's, and her face-markings curled down the sharp bones of her face like new-furled leaves. Jacinta couldn't help but notice that Zevran's mother was radiant with beauty even by elven standards; little wonder the father of her children had followed her all the way from Antiva.
"I made a mistake," she said, her rich voice shaking, "and it is through the grace of the gods and your father that we are all still together today. Mythal guard and ward you, my beloved son. May you never know my path." Zevran looked confused, and angry still, shaking off his mother's grasp.
Reluctantly, the woman rose to her feet. The guard who'd rolled his eyes said dryly, "We're all happy the lad's back, Helahui, but we're in the middle of a situation here, if you don't mind."
"There is no situation. I am vouching for the outsiders; the outsiders will see the Keeper," Tamlen said through gritted teeth, "and I don't owe you a damned explanation."
"Indeed," came another voice. A slight, elderly elven woman approached the little reunion. Though her back was slightly hunched, her eyes were a sharp, dark blue that belied the frailty of her dignified age. She wore the distinctive garb of a Keeper. Everyone straightened up, from Alistair to the guards.
"Keeper Marethari," Tamlen said respectfully, and for the first time since Jacinta had invoked Idris's name, Tamlen's gaze crossed hers. Almost immediately he looked away, back towards the Keeper.
"Tamlen," the Keeper said. Her voice was mild. "Report."
"Yes. As you can see, I found Zevran," Tamlen reported crisply. "He told me he'd seen the bereskarn." His face was expressionless beneath the vallaslin, though his throat worked. It took him a moment to recover; the creases in the Keeper's lined face seemed to deepen as she watched him. "These people helped him slay the beast. The woman said she is Dalish, swears her companions intend no harm. I had a compelling reason to bring her here past that." He shot a look at the eye-rolling guard that would have flensed meat off bones. "And it is not for the public ear."
"I weary of being spoken for," Jacinta said, suddenly and loudly, stepping forward. "My mother was the Keeper of her clan. She ran away; she took me with her. It is not my fault that she was captured by Templars. It is not my fault I was taken to the Tower. I am no less a Dalish for these things!" Her voice wavered, almost breaking, but recovered to full stridency as she raised her chin. "My word is not on trial here. I've come to ask for help and shelter. It was the way of my mother's clan to give solace to any of our people who came seeking it, and I myself vouch for the trustworthiness and good intentions of my companions. We will offer no violence, we intend no harm, we wish only... I only want to..."
The Keeper by the look of her had not missed a single emotion of the many that warred for control of Jacinta's features. "We will hear you," she stated. "Be your companions welcome, for now. Helahui, please see to their comfort. Zevran, we are most glad and grateful at your safe return, and you and I shall have speech later. You, child, will come with me." She nodded at Jacinta, and her gaze swept aside to include Tamlen as well. "Tamlen."
Helahui turned a smile on Leliana and Alistair that could have melted the gold off a coin, her relief at the return of her child illuminating her features, though Zevran still hovered a short, suspicious distance away from his mother. "Please," she said warmly, and even Alistair ventured a hesitant smile in response. He looked over his shoulder at Jacinta as Helahui led them away, his hazel eyes dark with concern. Jacinta shook her head, unable to summon any smile, let alone one of like radiance.
The Keeper led Tamlen and Jacinta to her aravel amidst the curious glances of her people and shut the door behind them. The familiar trappings, the geometric tapestries, the carved statuettes on a small shelf behind the Keeper when she took her seat with a fluidity that defied age, all of it made Jacinta's heart ache, her eyes stinging in a most unpleasant and unwelcome manner. She took a deep breath and sat before the Keeper, and tried not to see the ghost of her mother in the Keeper's dignified, unbent carriage.
"Yes?" Jacinta asked, barely permitting the silence to stretch before breaking it.
The Keeper's smile deepened, and Jacinta's hands tightened on her lap at the wise old warmth of it, at her automatic yearning to sit and be silent and listen. "First of all," Keeper Marethari said, "I would know of you, child, and what you sought by finding us."
Jacinta's fingers picked at her patched robes. "I had to leave the Tower. There was a misunderstanding..." She took a bitter breath, and glanced aside at a figure of a tall, stern hound, hip-high to a grown elf. Next to her before the Keeper, Tamlen sat quiet, his spine straight, his chin raised, every inch a proud Dalish. He could have sat for a sculptor. "Well, I suppose you can scarcely call it that. Not really. My best friend – I mean, he'd been my best friend since I was a child, since I was first brought to the Tower..."
In muddled, ungraceful sentences, Jacinta told the story.
Not days before they were ambushed, her mother had hurriedly administered the vallaslin with what little ceremony she could offer. Jacinta could still remember her soft, urgent voice. "In case of the worst, darling, I want you to have this. You are Dalish. You are the last of the elvenhan, my beloved daughter, and you will never submit." Jacinta had thought, in childish solipsism, that no one had ever suffered such pain. Her markings were still tight and swollen when the Templars surprised them.
There were four of them against an exhausted mage and her seven-year-old daughter, and even then her mother had fought them nearly to a draw before one got inside her guard, slammed her with wards and, as she reeled with the draining of her mana, killed her. Jacinta had, idiotically, tears streaming from her eyes, charged them. "The bitch brought her whelp?" one asked incredulously before they bound Jacinta and dragged her with them, leaving her mother's body unburied. Jacinta tried to use her magic against them, but after the incident of the exploding tree, they encased her in their workings night and day the whole trip long, an imprisonment more real and dire to a Keeper's daughter than any bindings of rope or steel. Her raw untutored magic boiled within her, stabbing at their foreign protections, testing their skill at every turn.
Quite gladly, they handed her off to the mages, a scrap of elf with more eyes than face. But she dreamed of her mother's death – the shock of the ambush, the horror of the humans' casual brutality, the red meat of her mother's neck when a broadsword clove her head clean off, the cervical spine a gristly white. And her mother's quick hands, so easy with magecraft, so quick to caress an unhappy child or soothe some small hurt, stilled forever against her blood-drenched robes. Her face didn't even look like her face. Her empty eyes screamed nothing to deaf elven gods.
When Jacinta dreamed in those first months, she shouted and struggled in her sleep, and the beds shook and the walls vibrated and the other mageborn children groaned and put their pillows over their heads and cursed the stupid elf. The only person who seemed to care at all was Jowan.
She didn't speak again until she was ten years old, but Jowan still sat with her. He showed her the way to class and to the privy, told her who to speak to and who to avoid, who was afraid of the dark, who was allergic to what, which little magelet showed talent at what bit of magic, which enchanters could be counted on for a spot of kindness in this forbidding gray place, which Templars were good and kind and which could not be trusted. He told her how he had bad dreams sometimes too, how everyone who groaned and moaned like they'd never heard of nightmares had had them as well, how some of them had even wet the bed, so she was scarcely alone in being afraid, and that he didn't mind if she was an elf, because it wasn't like being human had done much for him either.
The whole Tower grew accustomed to them. Sunlight and Shadow, light hair and dark, silence and ebullience, palling around the commons and the mess hall, sitting together in class. The instructors always paired them together, because it was unfair to pair the uncommunicative Jacinta with anyone else. When she finally did speak, her voice hoarse and shy, it was only to say, "Could you pass that?" at the table, but Jacinta would never forget the astonished look of joy on Jowan's face.
So when Jowan asked her help with Lilith, of course she agreed, even though she didn't think the Chantry heifer was worthy of him. And of course she took Jowan's word that he wasn't a blood mage, because he had never broken his word to her before. And of course she helped him destroy his phylactery, and of course she shattered hers while she had the chance, too, because sod the Templars and the plodding little circle of thin, tired magic that was all the Chantry permitted its pet mages to tread. And when it all fell to shit—
"I just wanted something like home," Jacinta said at last, and wiped at the damp corners of her eyes. "I heard there was a clan in the Brecilian Forest, perhaps mine, likely not, but still my people. I could think of nowhere else to go."
"So many losses," the Keeper murmured. "And the humans with you?"
"Leliana is a Bard out of Orlais. Her kindness keeps a cloak on my back. Alistair is a former Templar. He has earned my trust, and after hearing my story I believe you understand what a tremendous feat that was." The Keeper, Jacinta decided immediately, did not need to hear the epic tale of their first battle right now.
"I didn't think Templars were allowed to quit."
Tamlen hadn't spoken at all during Jacinta's story, but his calm, precise voice was almost startling, newly empty of hostility and tension. She caught the pale flash of his eyes, but shook her head. "Alistair's business is his own. You are free to ask him of it, of course. But I vouch for his character, and I assure you he is no longer with the Templars. I mean, think about it," she said, her voice tightening, "he would hardly run with an apostate into the middle of a Dalish camp if he were!"
"So now we know why you are here," the Keeper said. Jacinta raised her gaze to the elderly elf's face, yearning to be understood, shriven of blame and accepted, hoping for it so hard it bubbled up in her chest and she could scarcely breathe. But instead of saying what Jacinta so longed to hear, the Keeper glanced at Tamlen. "But Tamlen, what convinced you to bring her and her company here?"
"Aside from the not inconsiderable fact that they saved Zevran from a bereksarn," Tamlen began, and then stopped. He closed his eyes, his hands tightening on his knees, before opening them again. His face was devoid of expression once more. "Keeper, she knows about Idris," he said, and even with all that, his voice still buckled, nearly broke. "She knew she had slain the bereskarn that killed him. Her words rang of truth."
The Keeper's brows drew down, the soft skin of her round face drawing into wrinkles like a bit of paper clenched in a fist. "How is this possible?"
"I don't know," Jacinta said helplessly, spreading her hands. "But for the past few weeks, as I traveled here, I dreamed as Tamlen. Before I'd ever met him. I mean, I didn't know it was Tamlen, but now that we've met," she nodded uncertainly at Tamlen, whose face was stark, his eyes like dry ravines, "it's very clear to me."
"What exactly did you dream?" Tamlen asked.
"Everything," she answered. "Memories. As though I had lived them. As though I were you. Always I dreamed of Idris, but through your eyes. With your heart."
"With my heart?"
"I can't imagine that anyone in this camp loved him better than you," she said softly. Emotion flooded the wintry blue of Tamlen's eyes, and he wrenched his gaze away.
"How is that possible?" Tamlen demanded of the Keeper. "How could she know?"
"I assumed it meant that I was on the right course," Jacinta put in hastily, "that I was supposed to come here. The dreams came whether I willed them or not, but they were so – "
Beautiful, Jacinta did not say. Even through eyes that ached with grief that wasn't hers, the dreams were beautiful, as vibrant as the dark-haired elf with his charming smile and his dual swords around which every vision centered. "They didn't seem harmful. I did no magic to cause this. I don't know of any that could."
"How wasn't I aware," Tamlen snapped, "that I had someone magically – shuffling through my head, riding point through my memories?"
Keeper Marethari shook her head, as bewildered as the two of them, and that more than anything struck Jacinta with fear. Keepers knew. It was a rule of Dalish life that Keepers always knew. "I shall have to give this great thought," she said. "Jacinta, you and your companions may stay for three days. At the end of that time we will speak again. You may both go."
The setting sun looked like a blood orange, throwing its dying light about the camp. Tamlen looked beyond shaken, raking a hand through his pale hair as though reminding himself where his head was located. Jacinta glanced at him, and he gestured her over to a nearby tree.
"What was it, exactly, that you saw? When you went through my memories?" he asked, his tone half-pleading, half-demanding.
"Tamlen, I didn't do this on purpose. I couldn't control the process. I have enough going on in my own head," Jacinta assured him, "I wouldn't—"
He shook his head impatiently. "I just want to know what you saw of him," he said, and even Tamlen in all his strained self-control couldn't keep the pain out of his voice. As crisp and sudden as a snap of lightning in her fist, Jacinta understood what Tamlen was really asking.
"Well," she began, leaning back against the tree, and Tamlen hung on her every word, his eyes not leaving her face, "I saw when you were ten years old and went after those halla..."
