When he finally packed to leave Dragon's Peak four days later, Varel had a lot more – and finer – belongings than he'd first come there with. A suit of leather armour of much better quality than he'd ever owned before, a new sword as well, and a small purse heavy with coin, all gifts from Bann Sighard. From Oswyn, he had several of the outfits that had been loaned to him during his stay, and a pair of finely-crafted daggers. There was no way it would all fit into his backpack; he ended up having to make a blanket-wrapped bundle of his new armour and daggers – too fine for him to want to wear for everyday – and tie both them and the sword to the outside of his pack. An awkward-looking and unbalanced arrangement, but it wasn't that far to Denerim.
He had a final breakfast with Oswyn and his father, and a last conversation with Oswyn as the man walked with him out to the courtyard.
"Glad to finally be heading home?" Oswyn asked.
"I suppose. I'll have a lot to do once I get back. Looking for work, and a place to live, too."
"No one you can stay with?"
"A friend or two, sure... but my parents are both gone now. I'll have to see the hahren – that's sort of like our mayor, or perhaps more like a village elder – and get a place to stay more long-term. Bachelors quarters most likely, a room of my own if I'm lucky. Though I suppose between so many being sold off to slavery in Tevinter, and more killed during the Blight, that the alienage isn't as packed tight as it used to be," he said a touch glumly, then grimaced. "Which means the hahren will also be pushing for me to hurry up and get married."
Oswyn gave him a questioning look. "You're engaged? You never mentioned a girlfriend or anything like that..."
Varel grinned. "No, that's not how it usually works among elves. We're like you human nobles; it's an arranged marriage as often as not, only rarely for love. The hahren like to mix the bloodlines between the different alienages; the hahren arranges exchanges, men and women from our alienage travelling elsewhere, elves from elsewhere travelling here. Though I suppose with the alienage so empty it's mostly been elves coming here, the last while," he said, then frowned. "I hear the Amaranthine alienage is gone entirely – the elves were pretty much all gone by the end of the Blight Year. The city tore down what was left of it afterwards, and there's human housing there now. I heard that Highever was only slightly better off. Anyway, all of that means that the first thing the hahren will likely want to talk to me about is my marriage prospects."
Oswyn made a face. "Sounds charming. Well, I'll wish you a pleasant journey, and hope that things go well for you once you get back home."
Varel nodded. They'd reached the courtyard by then, where the reason he had chosen to depart today was waiting – a pair of waggons, headed off to Denerim market. He could get a lift to the city with them, which wouldn't save him all that much in the way of time, but would be much easier than trying to walk there carrying his overburdened pack. Oswyn introduced him to the carters, and after placing his pack in the back of one of the waggons, the two of them clasped forearms. Saying good-bye felt awkward – they'd known each other such a short time, and yet he felt he was losing a close friend now that it came time to say farewell. Oswyn seemed subdued as well, which made Varel worry a little; he'd seemed so much more cheerful the last couple of days.
"Can't say that I enjoyed that walk down the mountain, but I am glad that I met you because of it," Oswyn said, smiling warmly at the elf. "I've enjoyed your stay here. I hope you'll keep in touch?"
Varel smiled just as warmly back at him. "I will that," he agreed. "And you keep in touch too. Maybe next time you're in Denerim you can look me up."
Oswyn nodded and smiled. "Next time I'm in Denerim," he said. "Sure."
Varel climbed up into the waggon and took a seat on a cloth-wrapped bale of fleeces. The waggons lurched in motion, across the courtyard and out the gate. His last sight of Oswyn was of the man still standing in the courtyard, leaning on his cane with one hand, the other raised in a brief wave of farewell, which touched him more than it might have, knowing as he did how painful a motion it was for Oswyn to make.
It was only some hours later that he found himself thinking how uncertain that final smile had been, and realized that in all their talk of events since the Blight Year, Oswyn had never once spoken of being anywhere but within his father's bannorn.
Denerim seemed just as large, hectic, and almost as smelly as he remembered it, though there were also obvious changes. The city walls were different, enclosing a large space along the river to the west of where the old walls had been, a whole new district of the city with wide cobbled streets and houses built mainly of stone and good fired clay brick, with roofs of slate, not the half-timbered wattle-and-daub with thatched roofs that was more commonly used. Or had been more commonly used, the carters informed him.
Queen Anora apparently had rather decided ideas about suitable building materials after witnessing the firestorms that had ravaged her capital during the Blight Year; all reconstruction was to be in as inflammable materials as possible, with wide boulevards and an occasional high wall cutting the city into smaller districts that would hopefully help contain any such fires as did break out. As much of the city as had been destroyed during the Blight, substantial areas of it needed to be cleared and rebuilt anyway; she'd taken the opportunity to institute several reforms, including, he was told, a system of sewers underlying most of the city to channel waste to the river. No more emptying of slop buckets into the street; it all had to either be piped into the sewers, or collected in night-jars and carted away.
Then they got beyond the new quarter, and he began to get some idea of just how bad some parts of the city still were; the contrast between the new or rebuilt areas and the still-to-be-done areas was appalling. Entire neighbourhoods of the city were still little more than mounds of weed-overgrown burned rubble, with people living in poorly-constructed shanties among the mounds or within the more habitable portions of the wrecked buildings. It was as bad, if not worse, than the alienage itself had ever been, made all the more obvious here by how there'd be an area of newly-built or repaired buildings set right next to a wasteland. And naturally it was all the less affluent areas that were the least far along in being cleared and rebuilt. It made Varel worry for the state of the alienage.
The waggons finally reached the market; twice as large as it had been before the Blight Year, expanding into space made vacant due to the destruction of the buildings that had once stood there. The old smithy and laundry were both gone; the towering old half-timbered houses that had once obscured the view of the chantry gone as well. The chantry itself was gone, too, victim not of the invasion, but of the rebuilding afterwards, he was told; a new and larger chantry had been built in the new part of the city, along with a new chantry school, orphanage, all set in park-like grounds, far finer than the cramped quarters the old chantry and its outbuildings had occupied. Where they had been was now warehouses and workshops and stores, bordering on the enlarged marketplace, the warehouses placed to have easy access to the river, which had been cleared and dredged to support barge traffic. The carts stopped there, not far from the alienage bridge, and the carters bid Varel a reasonably friendly farewell, knowing that he was in good odour with their bann, and had had something to do with helping the bann's son, who was well-liked by his father's people.
He hefted his pack up and onto his back with some difficulty, where it made an unwieldy load along with his bow and quiver of arrows, then set out to the bridge, looking around interestedly as he walked. The market was bustling with customers, about half of whom had a reasonably prosperous look; a good sign for how well the recovery was going, though he still saw enough raggedly-dressed men and women, and starveling street-brats, to make it clear that the city was still as full of mixed fortunes as ever. There was also a larger guard presence than he remembered there being, though at the same time less fear or wariness of the guards; he saw one small group of them being hailed with obvious good feeling by the shopkeepers they passed, and being given polite nods by most of the populace as well. Some things had definitely changed for the better, he guessed.
Crossing the bridge to the alienage felt like walking back in time. He could see where the centre span of the bridge had been repaired, a swathe of new stonework rejoining the age-worn ends, but apart from that, the place looked much the same as he remembered. The same towering tenements, the same poorly-built and poorly-maintained sweatshops and run-down warehouses. The same narrow twisty streets of packed earth, that changed to foul mud in any rains, with only a few small stretches on the main street and near the vhenadahl paved with wide-spread cobblestones or cracked stone flags, all as warped underfoot as a buckled wood floor. The only change was in the population; still elven, but so many fewer of them, and so few of the faces familiar.
He went to Valendrian's house first of all, but the door was answered by a stranger, an older woman, with an infant in her arms, and three more children of assorted heights visible in the rooms beyond.
"The hahren? You must mean the old one – he passed away before we moved here," she said tiredly. "It's Alarith that's hahren now."
"Alarith? The storekeeper? But he's no elder," Varel said, surprised.
She smiled faintly, and shrugged. "It's him as has the job, elder or no. He should be in his store this time of day."
Varel nodded and thanked her, then crossed the square, such as it was, and ducked down the short narrow side-street that led to Alarith's store. You had to know it was there to find it; it had no sign that might lead a shemlen to it.
There was a stranger behind the counter; a young woman, perched on a high backless stool, belly bulging in advanced pregnancy. Varel spotted Alarith seated in a comfortable chair in one corner of the store, a group of cronies sitting on a bench nearby, most of them busy with their hands, doing piece-work for whatever small coin it brought in – whittling joinery pegs, or carving spoons and forks out of bits of horn and wood, that sort of thing.
Alarith looked up and spotted Varel, and grinned widely in recognition, putting aside the bit of cording he'd been working with, and rose to his feet. "Varel!" he exclaimed. "Haven't seen you since before the invasion! What have you been up to? No, wait, now I remember – you went for a mercenary, didn't you?" he asked, eyes taking in the matched daggers at Varel's waist, as well as his armour and the obvious sword strapped to his pack.
Varel grinned. "What gave it away? The armour?" he asked, earning a small laugh from Alarith and his friends. "I hear you're the hahren now?"
"That I am," Alarith said, a more serious expression crossing his face. "Weren't many elders left after the battle of Denerim, even if we did keep the worst of the fighting out of the alienage. Elder Valendrian decided that his successor needed to be a younger man, someone who'd be around for a good few years afterwards – stability, he said, was what we needed now. And since a lot of the work is things I already knew how to do, like record keeping, I somehow ended up getting pegged for it. Not that I'm complaining, it's not all that different than what I did as a shopkeep after all, except I'm bartering with people about marriages and moves instead of over a measure of grain and a handful of turnip greens. And housing, which I'm guessing is what you're most interested in at the moment?"
"Yes," Varel agreed with a smile. "I need a place to stay. A room of my own somewhere by preference – I have the money for rent – or I guess bachelor quarters otherwise."
"Room is no problem, as long as you can pay. We've still got a lot of places sitting empty, or near-as. Though I'll warn you a lot of them are empty 'cause people don't want to live there; chancy places where nasty things happened, during the Blight Year."
Varel nodded slowly. He could imagine the sort of places Alarith meant; the old orphanage, where so many had died even before the alienage was locked up. The building where Tevinter slavers had quarantined elves before shipping them off into slavery; places like that. "I'm not overly superstitious myself," he said. "I haven't met anything yet that wouldn't yield to cold steel or a well-placed arrow."
Alarith grinned. "Well said. Well, if you're not picky, I've a few places I can show you. Bekka, I'm going out for a bit," he called to the girl behind the counter, who merely nodded in acknowledgement. "My wife," he told Varel as he led the way out of the shop. "That's our first child she's about due for," he added, a note of pride in his voice. "She's from Ansburg, up in the Free Marches. They're overcrowded there, we got a good few new people from them. Lots of elves from all over moved to Ferelden, afterwards, but between Highever and here we're still far from as full as we used to be."
"And Amaranthine? I heard there's no alienage there any more?"
"No, nor ever like to be – the stories of what happened to the few elves leftover that the slavers didn't want, it's enough to turn your stomach... that damned Howe was a nasty one! Anyway, there's just a double handful of elves left in the whole arling, I hear, mostly ones who were living elsewhere, as servants to the banns, or were farmers or hunters and suchlike, not in the city itself. The new arlessa is supposed to be an all-right sort, the Couslands always treated their people reasonably well, so with the Amaranthine alienage gone, the few elves who have gone here have all settled at Vigil's Keep instead. Not in a proper alienage, but mixed in with all the humans. Dwarfs, too – there's a fair-sized number of what they call surfacers living there now also. Anyway, this is the first place," Alarith said, and led Varel into a building that was indeed the old orphanage, long-since cleaned up and even largely repaired and redecorated.
Not, after a lengthy tour of the numerous rooms there, a place he felt that he particularly wanted to live. He had bad memories of helping to clear the bodies out of there, after the riot, and the place had an unsettling feeling to it, and precious few windows; he preferred a place with at least some sunlight.
It was late afternoon before Alarith finally showed him a place he liked the look of; a pair of rooms, one of them surprisingly sizable, on the top floor of one of the old warehouses along the river. The pair occupied one end of the slant-roofed attic space, the larger room having two dormered windows with a view across the river toward the marketplace, while a small window in the end-wall gave a view across the alienage in the direction of the bridge, the top of the vhenadahl tree just visible beyond the rows of buildings. The smaller room was tucked in along the same end wall, a narrow slice of a room with a sharply pitched ceiling, just wide enough for a single bed, or a double if you didn't mind entering the bed from the foot of it. It even had another small window with much the same view of the alienage as the one in the larger room. There remained just enough space for a small wardrobe in the area between the door and the windowed wall.
The rooms were a full four flights of stairs up from ground level, in a warehouse that the slavers had made use of for smuggling the elves out of Ferelden, which explained why it was still empty; there were larger spaces lower down that were still sitting vacant, for that matter. But Varel liked the view, and didn't mind the stairs, which among other things would insulate him nicely from the noisy ground floor, which had all been turned into workshops since the Blight Year, and was noisy from dawn until well after dusk. And it being empty for so long made the rent a bit cheaper than it otherwise might have been. While he was reasonably well-off right now between what was left of his mercenary pay and Bann Sighard's gift, he knew he needed to watch his expenses; the coin wouldn't last forever.
Alarith took him to the building owner, and stood by while he negotiated the rent, then witnessed the deed for it, and for an additional fee helped him locate a reasonably clean mattress and a table and chair and other necessary furnishings, as well as a group of men – Alarith's cronies from the store, plus a few others – to carry the lot upstairs. By the time evening set in, Varel was able to close and lock his own door, and sit down on a chair – wobbly, but it'd do until he had time to either repair it or buy better – by the light of a cheap tallow candle, and eat a bowl of lukewarm stew with dumplings sent over by Alarith's wife.
He bundled up in his bedroll on the rag-stuffed ticking mattress, mentally making a list of things he needed to buy over the next few days to settle in properly, and was soon fast asleep.