Author's Note: Brief discussion of rape and pregnancy resulting thereof.
CHAPTER 12: The Herald's Origin
"Is all of Val Royeaux so pretentious?" Varric asked as they crossed the bridge leading to the bazaar. They had just passed by a pair of giant statues in dedication to Andraste. By Solas' count, it was the seventh such set of statures they'd walked by alone, no telling how many resided in the city proper in its entirety.
"Unfortunately yes," Cassandra responded.
"I don't know, I kinda like this addition to my outfit, pretentious or not," Yasmin said with far too much enthusiasm for somebody who had spent the last week on horseback. The Herald of Andraste twirled, her new dark crimson cloak fit for the ravages of winter fanning out in her wake. Cassandra rolled her eyes at the childish, though endearing behaviour. Yasmin had to adjust how she slung her spear to her back, but she sorted things out to her satisfaction. The cloak did a nice job of hiding the sword resting perpendicular to her spine across the small of her back.
"It's loud, and nearly unfit for stealth. It suits you," Solas said. Yasmin responded with a mock bow, though the apostate took the 'thank you' as it was intended. "Though how you are not sweltering is beyond me."
Yasmin shrugged. "I know how to disappear from sight. Whatever I'm wearing has no bearing on slipping past my enemy's eyes. And the heat's not so bad; a little sweat never hurt anyone. It's you southerners that can't stand it. Besides, when we return to Ferelden, it'll serve its purpose much better, you know how much I hate the cold." Solas nodded. She'd requested he walk near her while holding a flame in his hand for warmth multiple times on their journey to and from the Hinterlands.
The Herald turned to Lysette, "Are you from this place? I confess I'm not sure where your accent is from."
Lysette perked up a little, being addressed directly and responded, "I'm actually Ferelden born. My parents were trade-folk in Denerim. When I joined the Templar Order, they sent me to Montsimmard. I picked up the accent there."
"I thought you were just a recruit?" Solas asked the former Templar.
"The training takes many years, even before the introduction of lyrium. And I suppose I'm not the type that naturally keeps my original accent. I notice I sound more ah, Ferelden when I'm among family. It just sort of comes out again." Lysette shrugged and looked a little nervous with everyone in the party paying attention to her at once.
"There is no shame in losing your original accent. I always thought it was a mark of adaptability," Yasmin said. The Herald of Andraste was walking backwards again as she was talking to Lysette.
"You speak from experience, Herald?" Varric asked. Yasmin shot him a look of annoyance at the title. He gave her an innocent look back, the cheeky bastard.
"Yeah," she said as she spun back around.
"What, you just gonna leave us hanging like that?" Varric replied with a chuckle. "You sound just as Starkhaven as Choir Boy, but with 100% less pompousness."
"Who is…Choir Boy?" Cassandra asked, though she sounded almost reluctant to do so. Lysette was also interested as he was obviously referring to a devoted Andrastian.
"You actually might have met him, being a Seeker hailing from Starkhaven and all," Varric said to Yasmin. "Does Prince Sebastian Vael ring any bells?"
Yasmin raised her eyebrows, but then chuckled darkly, "He doesn't like me very much." Yasmin grinned at his intrigued expression. "His support of the Templars and from the Templars is something I know of quite well, the zealot. Before the war he used them as his personal guard even though Starkhaven's Circle was destroyed just after the Blight. King Vael didn't appreciate me trimming the tree so to speak."
"You killed his guards?" Varric asked, flabbergasted.
"Only the monsters among them," Yasmin shrugged like killing the Templar guards of a head of the second-most powerful Free March Nation State was a small thing. "He didn't interfere though, I was acting in official Seeker capacity, which is something he detested me for, but was powerless to stop."
There was a long silence that followed that when Lysette spoke up, "The survivors from the Starkhaven Circle disaster ended up in Kirkwall right? It wasn't an Annulment either; the Templars were caught in the blaze as well. Everyone at Kinloch was on edge about it when it was brought up, even over half a decade later." Yasmin's tone turned dark.
"They all died?" Solas asked, aghast.
"No, there were survivors, but it was still a catastrophe Starkhaven tried to keep as quiet as it could. With the Blight happening, they were mostly successful," Yasmin responded. "I would've been fifteen I think? No, I was sixteen, because I remember my birthday gift was a great surprise that year. I was in elsewhere when that travesty happened. We heard about it though."
"You don't sound Rivaini, and you don't look Starkhaven, where are you from?" Varric asked.
"I thought you were a resourceful man, Varric," Yasmin chided idly. Varric rolled his eyes, and Cassandra smothered a smirk. Lysette and Solas exchanged a put-upon look.
"From what I hear, not even Nightingale knows all that much about you other than what you've told her," Varric persisted.
Yasmin shrugged. She was wondering how much to tell them. Not everything for sure. Certainly not the Tranquil bit. Well, not yet at least, and she didn't exactly trust them yet either. In Solas' case, she wasn't sure if she'd ever trust him. But Cassandra had assured Yasmin while enroute to the Hinterlands that her secrets would be kept. Yasmin was touched by Cassandra's reassurance, even after she had the advisors sans Cullen take an oath. Varric was probably already writing his sequel to 'Tale of the Champion', so she wasn't particularly inclined to trust him yet either; at least until she could ensure his discretion. He wasn't a bad sort after all.
"Perhaps our resident Left Hand just hasn't shared her findings with you. Lady Montilyet probably knows everything our spymaster does at the present time," Yasmin said to the dwarf. "I gave Leliana more than information enough so that she'd know how to find out more about me and my past. It beats her having to harangue me about it when we return to Haven."
"Harangue you?" Cassandra asked with a smirk.
"Interrogate," Yasmin amended. "I was trying to be polite. We are in Orlais after all," Yasmin replied with an eye roll.
Yasmin looked at the former Templar. Lysette hadn't said anything either, and she doubted that Charter, especially while she was in Leliana's service, would betray her trust. Leliana and Josephine were professionals if nothing else, so Yasmin wasn't too concerned they would blab…unless she made good on her threat to leave the Inquisition if Cullen stayed. Then Leliana would probably leverage whatever was at her disposal to get her way.
Yasmin brought herself back to the conversation they were having. She shrugged. There wasn't really much to hide about her early upbringing, so that was fine for them to know. "I'm sure our spymaster knows more about us than we'll ever know. But very well." Yasmin took a deep breath and stopped walking, forcing all of them to turn to give her their full attention.
Yasmin briefly glanced at Cassandra before saying, "Briefly; I am the bastard child of a Magister who raped my mother. She is a Dalish elf. She was First of her Clan, before she was snatched up in Rivain by slavers a couple years before my birth. Her rest of the clan fled southward after they lost so many of their number during that raid." At the horrified looks that statement got, she shrugged and continued, "I was born in Rivain a few months later, and spent my childhood around Dairsmuid until my mother went back to her clan. She sent me to the Chantry to become a Templar in Starkhaven. She's still alive, far as I know."
Lysette in particular looked sick, "She…she,"
"Yes?" Yasmin asked, though not unkindly.
"She kept the baby?" Varric whispered. Everyone else flinched at his bluntness.
Only Yasmin saw Lysette's voice falter on the rest of her sentence, 'She…she was raped?'
Yasmin gave Lysette a nearly imperceptible nod before addressing Varric; "Kept me you mean? I don't know if it was by choice or my father found out and forced her to keep me when he found out. But yes, she ended up keeping me. I don't know if that makes her a stronger or more moral person than me. I've never been impregnated against my will, so I can't say for certain what I'd have done in her place," Yasmin mused about her own existence. "She never resented me though, even if she had every reason to do so. My existence was the proof that her life had been irreparably destroyed. I never knew anything but love from her, and those first eight years were the best of my life."
"She abandoned you to the Chantry?" Solas asked with poorly veiled anger.
"I look human–," Yasmin said before Solas rudely cut her off with a question.
"Is that any excuse?" the horror in Solas' voice made Yasmin very interested, but she just shook her head; question for another day.
"Not even a little bit. At least, that's what I thought when I was younger, even until I was a already older than when my mother gave birth to me. Then I happened across the aftermath of what happens when shemlens see a human-looking child, a Halfling like me, living with a Dalish clan: dead, all of them. They were slaughtered. The shemlen who did the deed were all bragging about their great victory at the local pub, 'drinks on the house,' the bartender cheered. There wasn't much of a bar left by morning, just a smoking horror. Tragic affair involving a drunk with matches and a bottle of Antiva's finest doing a trick that went badly wrong." If they had any reaction to Yasmin implying she burned down a bar nobody said anything.
Yasmin was fiddling with the edge of her cloak, trying to keep her temper under control. "My mother was protecting me in the best way she knew how to. She ensured that the most 'renowned' warriors from the most powerful organization in Thedas took me in. She even paid a human tavern maid to walk me up to the Templars guarding the chantry to avoid any suspicions on my behalf," Yasmin almost barked out, tone long since turned hostile. "Even if mother wanted to raise me alone much longer, how long do you think we would've lasted before some potentially well-meaning guard or soldier decided to take the human child back from the 'dirty knife-ear'? An apostate 'knife-ear' at that. After all, everyone knows the Dalish steal shemlen children for blood-magic, right? We were already on years of borrowed time by the time we arrived in Starkhaven. Before any of you think you could've done better, my mum wasn't even sixteen yet when she gave birth to me." Yasmin spit out the last part even as her off-colour eye gleamed savagely even in daylight.
There was silence after that. None of them had heard the murderous intent in her voice, her posture, and her gestures like this before. It was frightening to the point where even Solas and Cassandra exchanged a worried glance. Yasmin reeled her emotions back in slowly. "On top of all that, Mum was smart. She left me in Starkhaven, the most devout of the Marcher States. My mum wasn't an idiot. She ensured that I had every shemlen and Andrastian protection she could give me on my side; even though she couldn't be the one to protect me herself. If that's not love, I don't know what is."
The others had long since begun looking distressed as Yasmin's origin seemed to poor out of her, "And so I was in Starkhaven, in the care of the Chantry training to become a Templar. I learned how to harness my grief in ways that made even the older boys wary of me. And that is where I caught the eye of a young and powerful Seeker of Truth who was passing through, who just so happened to be looking forward to taking on an apprentice, despite her relative youth. It was almost like providence," Yasmin chuckled again, this time was far less dark though.
"I was still quite young then, and when the very tall and pretty lady said she wanted to look after me, teach me her ways; I jumped at the chance. I think I was nearly ten at the time. And so she brought me to her superiors, and checked in on me when she had the time, teaching me all the cool tricks."
The companions were digesting this for a few minutes while Yasmin's breathing fall back into a normal rhythm.
"Forgive me, but you don't seem like the most pious sort," Solas pointed out.
Yasmin gave a genuine laugh, a nice release from the dark tension that had been weighing her down the last few minutes, "I used to have faith; though not as strongly as those around me, and not in Andraste or either of her shitty husbands." Cassandra bristled at that, but held her tongue. "My mother raised me teaching the stories of her people, that she remembered. She herself had long since felt abandoned by her gods, Mythal in particular. What kind of 'Great Protector' must Mythal must be if her faithful are enslaved, brutalized, and more often than not murdered on her watch." Yasmin shook her head as if to ward away her dark thoughts.
"She didn't make that choice for me though. She told me their stories, but didn't present them as gods, but as flawed characters in an old story. The Dalish Pantheon is a big myth to me. Figures who probably lived before time was counted, and were beings of supreme power. I personally preferred Andruil; the Lady of Fortune and greatest hunter who ever lived. I don't so much as worship her like I did when I was a child, but she still inspires me. What am I now if not a hunter of the wicked?" Yasmin got distracted as she mentally catalogued the names of the Dalish pantheon and arrived at Fen'Harel; the name in Solas' head, tied to the image of him on the castle in the cloud cover. Yasmin jerked herself out of that thought. It was for another day. And she tried to remember were she was before she started spouting off about the Dalish gods. "Anyways, a little Andrastian chanting wasn't going to get in the way of me getting stronger. It was the last thing my mother told me to do before I lost sight of her, to get stronger, to become stronger than she had been."
Varric whistled, "Well, I think you got your wish there huh?"
Yasmin laughed a little and conceded, "Yeah, I really did. Took a very odd path to get there though."
"How did…no, sorry, I shouldn't ask," Lysette cut herself off before she accidentally hurt the Herald.
"No, it's alright, you can ask," Yasmin said with a friendly smile. "It was all a long time ago, nearly twenty years since I joined the Chantry in Starkhaven."
"Have you seen your mother since then?" Lysette asked very quietly.
"If it's alright, I'd rather not discuss that just yet. We have an important day ahead of us, and I get frightfully emotional when I talk about it," Yasmin replied after a moment of thought. Cassandra and Varric exchanged a dubious look behind Yasmin's back while she patted Lysette who looked aghast at making the Herald sad. Yasmin just laughed at her look of horror. "Don't worry, Lysette. I said you could ask after all. I'll tell you at some point, but I need my head centred on my shoulders for the next few hours is all. This wasn't a decline to answer indefinitely, just a postponement."
"Was the Seeker who noticed you among the Templars you referred to our own Seeker Cassandra Pentaghast?" Solas asked with a quirked eyebrow.
Yasmin nodded enthusiastically, "Yeah it was!"
Cassandra just made an annoyed sound as she pinched the bridge of her nose. "Can we not?" she asked.
In a remarkable swing of emotions, Yasmin laughed light-heartedly and punched Cassie's shoulder; "You mean you don't want me telling them about how you were back then? Remember you hair? It was so luscious and regal when the wind wreathed it around you like a halo," There was an almost foreign light of glee in Yasmin's eyes as she teased Cassandra that the others hadn't seen there before.
"Maker give me strength," Cassandra muttered as she made a point of striding ahead of the rest of them, Yasmin's cackling and snorting laughter lapped at her heels.