chapter two

lothering pt 2

She clicked the trap down into place. Ready and tight as a bow-string, she tapped a branch at its center to test it and delighted at the way the sharp teeth slammed together, snapping it in half.

Allison gasped as if she had just performed a magic trick and clapped her hands twice at the sight.

Syld glanced over at Leliana from where she crouched, tinkering with her own and leaning in beside her. She looked just as delighted. Leliana's own traps were pristine. Her fingers were deft and did far better work, had made six to her three. It had been a long time since she'd built one and she felt clumsy with it.

'I don't know how I- it's very nice of you to…'

'Not to worry,' Leliana said kindly.

This had to be the mousiest little shem she had ever met. Syld doubted severely that a few traps were going to stop the horde of darkspawn, but if it helped with that nervousness of hers, she was glad for it.

They all knelt in what was almost a conspiratory circle, Alistair roughhousing with Hobbs on the sidelines, looking in with the mild curiosity of someone who may or may not have got a (thankfully) armoured leg stuck in such a trap at Ostagar. Morrigan lingered close by, bored for the way she inspected the invisible dirt under her nails.

'Here, let's show you how to set them again so you don't lose a limb.'

'Ah, g-good idea.'

She listened to Leliana go through the process once more meticulously, and Allison nodded, wide-eyed. She didn't look so scared of them now, a fidgety thing picking at the hem of her dress where it flared out around her knees, calming under the lilt of Leliana's words. She wasn't the only one in Lothering that walked around like their bones were rattling.

Halfway through the lesson a few vulgar shouts echoed from the edge of town, making Allison flinch. Syld strained to see over her shoulder.

'What is that?'

'The guards yell sometimes.'

'They have a prisoner in a cage out there,' Leliana clarified. She had a heavy set to her brow and Syld didn't think she had yet seen her so unimpressed. 'I have no doubt they're losing their wits just as much as the rest of us, but it is terribly unnecessary.'

'It makes me nervous.' Allison admitted.

They were being very foul indeed, disrupting the already static uncomfortable air, and whatever peace Lothering clung to. Villagers and refugees regarded the noise anxiously.

And Sten of the Beresaad was taking it like a champ.

When Allison was able to repeat the process without losing her fingers, Syld stood and dusted off her knees.

'Allison,' she said, stern, and the girl's eyes darted up, her hand already outstretched to give Leliana her silvers. 'Do yourself a favour and get out of here. Find somewhere else to set up those traps.'

'But my home is…'

'A house is just a house. A home is for living people, okay?'

She looked at Syld like she was a little odd, but nodded regardless. They left the girl with her burlap of new traps.

'I don't imagine you needed to make traps like that in the alienage.'

She glanced over at Leliana. 'We have pretty big rats.'

Leliana smiled at her like she was joking. She wished she was.

The comment had an edge of delicate curiosity to it that made Syld think she was going to ask more about the connection between a city girl and heavy duty hunting traps, but she didn't. She seemed the niggling, frustratingly patient type.

'Can I ask why it is we still linger here?' Morrigan asked her, at least waiting until they were out of earshot of Allison.

'These people need help.' Leliana cut in.

'If these people were smart, this village would be empty.'

But panicking people were not smart, hordes of them even more so.

'These people have been abandoned by their own Bann. Who would help them if not us?' Alistair demanded.

'Far be it for me to remind you exactly who you are.'

'A Grey Warden. I got that, you know, when I became a Grey Warden.'

'Suppose you look at the bigger picture for a moment and stop dallying with every motherless child and every foolish girl who doesn't know how to run when they should.'

'And here I thought your cruelty was superficial. You know, angry shell and soft, gooey centre.'

'I'm not an egg.'

Leliana cleared her throat to catch Syld's attention. The bickering continued on downwind. 'I have some belongings to collect in the chantry.'

'Do these belongings include armour? I was starting to wonder if you planned on helping us fight the archdemon in a dress.'

'Perish the thought.'

'As much as pink suits you.'

Leliana laughed, soft and lilting. 'This pink is atrocious, and it is such cumbersome material.'

As it always did, their fighting eased off into an awkward silence. Judging by the look on Alistair's face Morrigan had once again gotten in the last cutting insult.

Threes. Everyone always said it happened in threes. No one ever mentioned the fours, fives and sixes.

Maybe her luck was just like that, though.

And she should have known. They had been shaken awake that morning, eyes opening to the shadow of a Templar none too keen to find more stragglers desperate for shelter in Lothering. She had read the place right. He welcomed them with a warning. There was an edge-of-your-seat kind of panic that was driving people together, but to clash in an inevitable way. It split families apart. It drove people to the dirt under street lamps. If he looked at them with suspicion for being Wardens, he said nothing.

They'd cleaned the highway for them, after all.

One. One was Loghain's men, their blood all over the tavern walls. She had been angry, no mistake. Might have even killed them all if Leliana hadn't been there.

Being inside the chantry was no help. It was warm, and fretful. Quiet like the early hours. Chanting, as Syld had expected, but no smooth voices and echoes of the sappy prayers of good harvests and good-looking children, or whatever it was that people prayed about. There was lots of trembling in the octaves, fast words she barely caught.

She felt a little claustrophobic in this place of worship. Maybe it was ignorant to generalise an entire religion, but she hadn't met an Andrastian that hadn't tried to school her morally or call her a heathen for questioning it.

Well, Leliana hadn't done any of that yet, but she wouldn't hold her breath.

Speaking of the lay sister. Syld watched her return from the chantry dorms positively glowing in a set of chainmail. Where a chantry biddy had managed to find such well-maintained armour and make it look like a second skin, Syld was entirely too curious. Leliana got caught up with a conversation with Bryant, one of the least stuffy Templars. Lothering might have fallen into chaos if it hadn't been for Ser Bryant and the revered mother, all of them dangling over a chasm that promised darkspawn and eventual annihilation.

How often her mind seemed to stray to the extremes.

She might have tried uniting with Morrigan in that moment for the way she looked just as uncomfortable in these confining walls, except the witch's eyes were like daggers and her tongue just as sharp, and she kept herself off to the side.

Templars. Templars everywhere.

'Syl, do you have a moment?'

Chewing on a hangnail, and glad for the reprieve of Leliana and Bryant's borderline flirting, she allowed herself to be beckoned by Alistair.

He stood by a man. Unshaved, ragged and weather worn, the lushest set of eyelashes she had ever seen on a man.

'This is Ser Donall. He's a knight from Redcliffe. Syl,' Alistair's voice bordered on uncomfortable. 'Do you still have that locket we found on the highway?'

She shared an uneasy look with Alistair, and started to sling her pack around to her front, digging through it.

'My fellow knight Ser Henric was supposed to meet me here, days ago.' Donall said, quietly.

'If this is the same Henric, then your friend is dead. He, um, he had this—' She dug around in her pack, found the token and the note, wrapped in a shoddy bundle of cloth she'd rustled up, and held her hand out. Alistair winced at her bluntness. '—on him.'

Donall, still recovering from the verbal slap, gently took it from her and unbound the cloth.

'He is dead,' he said, flat, the air leaving his chest. 'His locket? And a note… something, something about a scholar. Maker's Mercy… ah, thank you my lady. I would never have known otherwise. I dread to think how many of us have met similar fates on this mad quest.'

'I'm really sorry about your friend.' she said honestly.

'Thank you.'

'And we killed most of the shithead bandits that did it.'

Donall blinked, looked around, maybe to see if the Maker was going to smite her where she stood and whether or not he was in the splash zone. None of the priestesses seemed to hear.

'Well… thank you, my lady.' He did look a little better for it. She reasoned that if somebody had killed her friend she would either want to deal with them herself or be told they were already rotting on the ground. They had seemed a simple enough ragtag bunch of idiots capitalising off the panic, and in retrospect they had chosen their victims poorly in them. One grieving Templar, one Wild Witch. And she, well. Some unchecked bloodlust. A thing for hearing dirtbags beg for their lives. Now she felt bad for letting some of them live.

'What even brings you here, Donall? Anyone in their right mind is fleeing the darkspawn.'

'I fear the Arl has fallen gravely ill.'

Alistair responded interestingly to that. Shocked to the point that he mouth fell open, some kind of panic that reminded her of the way he had responded to Duncan's death. At that point in time Syld, on the occasion shrewder than most gave her credit for, could only wonder why the dwindling life of some Arl could make him so uneasy, and it further highlighted how little they knew about each other.

'If the Arl is sick, ser, what are you doing here?'

'By order, every knight in Redcliffe has gone in search for the Urn of Sacred Ashes. It is said that Andraste's Ashes can cure any illness. But I fear we are chasing a fable. With each day, my hope dims.'

She tried not to snort. It amounted to nonsensical supersticion, but she had seen a lot of things in the last few days that defied nonsense, much of it had become her harsh reality. There could be an Urn out there, filled with the Ashes of the… Maker's bride? What a load of shit.

'We desperately need to see the arl.' Alistair said.

'Is that so? And what business would you have with him?'

Her hackles rose before she could stop them. 'Besides the mounting darkspawn threat? Oh, just to see the sights of Redcliffe from his tower, maybe. I assume he has a tower.'

'I… beg your pardon, my lady. I meant no suspicion on my part.'

'Forgive my rudeness.' The word was punctuated with a look her way. 'This is Syld, the latest member of the Grey Wardens. The Teyrn has named us traitors, Donall. We need Eamon's support.'

'Yes, well, whatever Loghain has done, the arl's health is my only concern at this point in time.'

'You know he's probably got his slimy fingers stuck in that business, though.' Syld interjected.

Both Donall and Alistair looked at her with veritable confusion.

'You don't think it's a spectacular coincidence that he's fallen ill around the same time Loghain left the king for dead, do you?'

The implications of her statement dawned on both of them and she had to stop herself from rolling her eyes.

Alistair dragged a hand over his mouth, suddenly distraught. 'If he had planned that… if he had planned that before abandoning the King…?'

Donall sighed, weary. 'Such thoughts do not sit well with me. I must return to Redcliffe soon, to tell the arlessa that this is a quest of desperation and nothing more. Perhaps I can pass on this knowledge, though I hope desperately it is not true. I best be on my way. Farewell Alistair, my lady, you have been most helpful. I am glad you live.'

'Good luck,' Alistair offered, as Donall gathered his things and made a haste exit past them, grasping and shaking Alistair's shoulder in farewell as he did so. He stared after Donall for a long, troubled moment.

'What was all that about?'

Alistair blinked, settling his eyes back to her and the look she was giving him. Cat-eyed now, and very curious.

'What do you mean? I haven't seen Donall in quite a while.'

'Do you know him?'

'Um…Donall?' he said, mildly confused.

'No. Eamon.'

Alistair scratched the back of his head. 'Yes, I did.'

'That might have been useful information to us, don't you think? He'll take us more seriously if he has a friend amongst us. At the very least we won't get thrown straight into prison when we arrive at Redcliffe.'

'Yes, well… I wouldn't know about that.' He nodded in another direction, looking like he wanted to take flight. 'Shall we press on? Being in the chantry is making me… itchy.'

With that, she couldn't agree more.

On their way back to steal Leliana from Ser Bryant, she felt a frantic tug on her arm.

'Ohhh, Maker.'

Alistair pointed towards Morrigan and a Templar. He had a hand on his blade.

Two.

Morrigan looked out of place. She didn't exactly give off waves of rainbow and sunshine at the best of times, and she had a sourer tongue than most, but she was not stupid enough to start a confrontation surrounded by those that hunted down apostate mages for a living.

When the Templar took an unnecessary step towards her, instinct kicked in and Syld stomped between the two of them and shook Alistair off when he tried to stop her. She all but rounded on the templar, and went up to the tips of her toes to make him flinch back.

'What do you think you're doing?' she demanded.

'Stay out of Templar business.'

'Oh, stay out of it? While your eyes linger overmore?' Morrigan sneered at him.

'We want no trouble here.' he said, all muffled by his great, stupid helm.

'You're threatening my friend.'

'I know what your friend is-'

'What, an innocent bystander? She's just standing here!' Syld challenged.

Alistair entered the dispute with his hands raised, trying to calm the tension. 'Hey now. This doesn't have to be a thing.'

'Look at him! He's got a hand on his weapon. He's making it a thing.'

'Come on, can you blame him? It's Morrigan. She's terrifying.'

Morrigan looked as if she'd never received a better compliment.

'Listen, ser, we were on our way out anyway-'

'Are you threatened by us?' Syld interrupted him, her tone goading.

'Hardly,' the Templar scoffed.

'Then mind your own fucking business.'

'Syld!' Alistair said, exasperated.

'Get her in check,' the Templar warned him, completely looking over her head.

She bristled at that. 'He's not my keeper.'

'Leave it, Syld.' She could here the plea in Alistair's voice, felt another hand on her arm.

'Maybe you need one.'

'Excuse me?'

'Don't you know your kind last longer with manners?'

Alistair swore under his breath. His grip tightened, maybe at the sound of her fists clenching so hard that her armour started to creak.

'My kind? They do, do they?' she said, quietly. 'If I wasn't a Warden I'd-'

'You're lucky Ser Bryant has stayed our weapons, Knife-ear.'

She could tell it just slipped out. Just his eyes, bulging that little bit, what little she could see. The stutter that followed.

Didn't change a thing.

She wasn't exactly sure how it had escalated to the point where she'd threatened to jab out the templar's eyeballs because trust me, I've done it before, but by that point Alistair had an arm about her waist, the Revered Mother was kicking them out, and they'd all agreed that moving forward Tarasylde would not be heading negotiations.

The chantry yard was in an uproar, but not because of her. A Chasind man was screaming at the top of his lungs and a crowd had gathered about. Hobbs was barking, vicious and deafening at the sight of her struggling in Alistair's arms, shouting to be put down.

Alistair deposited her on the ground.

'Calm down,' he said bluntly. 'And calm him down.'

She crouched on her toes immediately, attentions turning to Hobbs. She held him close to stop him from jumping about. She could feel the eyes of people staring, tried to ignore them and cooed an apology until he quietened once more, and she breathed deeply to cool her boiling blood.

She tried to pretend like they weren't talking about her. Leliana and Alistair speaking quickly to Ser Bryant and the revered mother, taming their concerns about allowing such a woman like her to remain unchecked in Lothering.

She's been through a lot. She's young. She's...

Three. Fucking three.

She was entirely caught off guard when the large Chasind man began screaming at her instead, casting a shadow over her and Hobbs. It set him off again immediately, and she had to put her hand at his hackles and ease him back.

'This elf! Can you not see the vile blackness that fills her!'

'Please! Stop!' somebody begged. 'You're scaring the children talking like that!'

'They should be! Better to slit their throats now than let them suffer at darkspawn hands!'

The crowd was growing, from his spectacle and hers. They cried for him to stop. And still Hobbs barked, setting off the shrieks of a newborn.

It was too much.

'Hobbs,' she snarled, and the hound instantly fell silent and put his nose to the ground. She whirled on the Chasind as she stood, her head still full of foul anger, and gave him a hard shove to make distance between them. 'What the fuck are you doing? Why are you trying to scare these people, man?'

'They should be! Should be scared! The darkspawn are upon us, they are all dead! Every last woman and child, dead!' he cried, heading whipping around to eye each and every villager. He grabbed for her arm and she flinched away, threatened him with a fist. 'You… you! You will be the first of those who would destroy us! I can smell it, foul, evil, evil evil.'

'You need to- you need to stop, okay.'

'I will not be silent! I watched the black horde descend on my people! Darkness swallowed the marshes whole,' he wailed, so close she felt spittle hit her cheek, could see the shadows were heavy under his eyes, veins in his neck thick and stark. He looked at her with a haunted kind of desperation.

Tears streamed down his face.

'Your… people died.' she echoed.

He stared at her so long she thought he couldn't comprehend her. And then an awful sob wracked him. 'My family…' he gasped, voice brittle like glass, too quiet for the bellows he was capable of.

And then he started to crumple. A slow descent to the ground at her feet.

All at once she felt numb, cold, the anger gone from her. Looking around she saw the fear in everyone's faces, fear of this broken man. Fear of her.

Very slowly she crouched to meet his gaze. She tried to be steady. She tried to let him know that she saw him, heard him.

'What happened?'

'My clan…' he continued, 'all of them… butchered. Those creatures butchered them. We cannot escape them. We cannot escape!'

'Hey,' she hushed, as his voice started to rise again. 'You escaped, didn't you?'

'I… I ran… I ran, listening to the sounds of my wife's screams. I ran as they dragged her off.' He reached again, so slowly and gently this time that she let him. She held her breath as he pinched a few strands of her hair between his fingers, trembling. 'She had hair the same colour as yours. Maybe a… maybe a little more… curl. So big. Wild and-' his voice caught in his throat.

'I'm sorry.' she said. 'Truly, I am.'

He cried deeply then, so deeply she had to remind him to breathe.

She had heard many stories of the Chasind, the type you tell over campfires in the woods. A tale of savages that one wouldn't want to stumble upon in said woods. Because they could be vicious, and they could make you suffer.

She looked about and saw that people simply did not understand him.

He moaned quietly. 'I… I should not have come here. I should not have come.'

They sat crouched low to the ground for a long time until he cried himself out. She stood as he did and was startled when he left without another word, and she had a mind to follow him, terrified of what he was going to do. Instead she remained still, and helplessly watched his retreating back. He went in too straight an aimless line.

The silence left in his wake was tangible.

'We're all dead. We're all gonna die.' someone said, hopelessly.

Already there was a burst of mutterings, another wave of despair, but Syld had no mind for it.

'Stop it, the lot of you.' she said, sounding too gruff, and she tried to pretend it wasn't because the Chasind had left her throat all tight. 'You all have better things to do.'

'And why should we listen to the likes of you? We just saw you get tossed from the chantry! You're no better than that Chasind savage.'

She looked about for her companions. She finally noticed the many eyes on her. Alistair, patting Hobbs down. Morrigan, her gaze unreadable. Leliana stood with the revered mother and Bryant up the steps, looking grim upon the spectacle.

'Maybe I'm not.' she agreed, digging the heel of her palm into her eye socket, trying to reach the place where her head ached suddenly.

'There's no hope for any of us.'

'Of course there's hope.' she said firmly, her voice rising so the entire crowd could hear. 'It's only when you lie down and give up that you have no hope, so stop talking like that fucking doomsayer, and keep moving, and don't give up.'

Another murmur rippled through the crowd, but it was decidedly more positive than the last.

Syld glanced over, just as the Chantry doors were shut on her for good. She excused herself from the growing enthusiasm of the crowd to meet with the rest of her party.

There was a moment of awkward silence that followed, as nobody was quite sure how to proceed after such a spectacle.

She knew. Her body did, at least. She turned away from them, feet already taking her out of the yard, brisque. No one called out for her and she wasn't sure if that was better or worse.

She kept walking and kept thinking of his face, talking about a dead wife, reliving it.

She walked as far as the cage before she stopped to even consider what exactly her plan was. Distance? Time? Escape?

The Qunari?

He sat squashed at the bottom of the cage, not that she expected anything different. She opened her mouth to speak but instead took a squeaky inhale at the sight of him. For some reason it had been easier at night to process just how big he was. A great hulking thing, head bent, eyes closed.

'Hey.' she said, shaking off her nerve and walking closer.

His eyes remained closed, giving no indication that he had heard her.

She froze again when she noticed there was very little movement in that big chest of his.

'Shit, are you dead?'

His eyes opened in an instant. Underneath that heavy set brow they were like pinpricks. Bright, strange. She hadn't noticed it as much last night. Glittery came to mind before she banished it, because she realised she was still just gawking at him like an idiot.

'Not dead,' she breathed.

'You are crying again.' he said.

She couldn't even find it in herself to be mad or deny it. She knew how red her face must be. 'Yeah.' she agreed. I just royally fucked up again, Sten of the Beresaad.

It was just too bad that everyone but her had to be surprised about that. In truth she had amounted to little more than a thief and alienage reject in Denerim. She was no liberator.

She sniffed. 'So, um, you're still a scary fucker in the daylight, aren't you.'

'I am not here to amuse you, elf.' It sounded like a warning, albeit a tired one. His voice was deep, his accent making the words hard and biting.

'I'm easily amused, to be honest.'

He studied her for a long, unnerving, unblinking moment, and she had to stop herself from flinching back when he grappled with the iron bars and unsurely found his feet.

He towered over her.

The step she took back was instinct alone.

Her neck was craning now. If there was anything that could drive the hoards away it was gauging the full spectrum of his height.

He was terrifying, truly. Built of thick muscle, neck almost like the trunk of a tree. Some alien gauntness in the grey of his flesh. A strange crest at his forehead. The spatter of red on his chest was stark in the daylight, old and crumbling and almost gone in some places.

She muttered under her breath, cleared her throat for confidence. 'So, ah, Qunari, right? Did I say that-'

'What do you want, Warden.'

She frowned, chewed on her bottom lip and felt foolish and desperate. 'I just… I saw you, and our conversation really helped last night so I thought-'

'Hey! Back away from the cage if you know what's good for you!' Two guards from the night before swooped in on her.

The younger one eyed her suspiciously. 'You again. What do you want?'

'I was just having a few more words with the Qunari.'

'What are you playing at?'

'I'm not playing at anything.'

'Just a "few more words" with this blighted animal here. Right. You gotta be raving mad.'

'I can handle him.'

The elder of them snorted, rustling his moustache. 'Oh you can, can you? You even know what he done? Look at her, Holt, she doesn't even know. You dumb girl. He's a Blighted child-killer.'

Four.

She froze. 'What?'

'That's right.'

She gave him a sidelong glance, hoping to give the Qunari a chance to deny it. He did not. He stared, silent, grim. Accepting. She felt ill.

'Killed 'em with his bare hands. Still wanna chat, huh? Piss off, girl.'

She didn't even notice Hobbs until he made a deep noise from behind the guards that made everyone visibly flinch. The others were not far in the distance.

'My dog doesn't like the tone you're taking with me.' she said, but too quiet. She didn't look at the Qunari again.

She ignored the guards as she barged passed. The one she knocked into called her something awful but then held his tongue when Hobbs reiterated that dangerous noise again.

Still numb, she met her party halfway.

'I feel like you need a leash or something,' Alistair said.

''Tis possible she might just chew right through it.'

'Sorry,' she said quietly.

Leliana and Morrigan shared a glance. Alistair remained oblivious.

'Syl, what is your obsession with befriending blighters locked in cages?' he demanded. 'Something tells me this one's not going to pull a key out of his sphincter. You really shouldn't have been talking to him.'

There was an uncomfortable charge in the air, and Leliana and Morrigan shrank back out of the confrontation. She felt Hobbs bow into her, showing teeth. She hated this back and forth. They acted uncoordinated with each other, new and fresh, like strangers.

They were.

'I know.' she said, putting a hand on Hobbs to soothe him.

'Right, well…' Alistair trailed off, not expecting her to have agreed. 'What did he do, anyway?'

She glanced at Leliana, who looked terribly sad. 'The revered mother said he slaughtered an entire family. Even the children.'

Felt her stomach drop at that, a sick feeling that went all the way to her toes. She looked at Alistair, whose mouth formed a grim line. There was nothing smug about him at that moment.

Her eyes strayed back to the cage. He stood very still, eyes closed, unmoving. From this distance, she barely caught the breath in his chest.

She had befriended him so easily. She was a fool.

'Was it some kind of...? Was he attacked?'

Leliana sighed. 'I do not know the details, only that it was a massacre. He is a strange man. Did you know, he waited days for the knights to arrive? He put up no fight when they restrained him.'

And there it was. The disconnect. There was no way the Lothering guards could have detained someone like him. He was possibly the most enormous man she'd ever seen. Beast. Qunari. He had hands like a brute, arms like he'd lugged big things around all his life, possibly a sword that he was quite sufficient in cleaving things in half with. Those rusted cage bars would be nothing to him. And yet he had spoken so reservedly. Aware of his crimes. At ease with his punishment.

Kind to her, in his way.

'Are you alright, Syl?'

The incident in the chantry seemed so far away now that she almost thought Leliana meant...

'I'm fine.'

She had calmed down enough then to realise her anger had gotten the best of her. Hindsight and all that. She thought Leliana would be disgusted with her for bringing such violence and foul language into her Maker's house. Instead she tutted, and made Syld feel like a child. She didn't know what was worse. She'd always hated the way her father had reprimanded her like that.

'Well…' Leliana said, too lightly for the heavy atmosphere. 'Shall we take another look over the Chanters board?'

Alistair looked unsure. 'Think they'll want to pay us anything after… that?'

'It is desperate times. I'm sure they'll forgive a bit of bad language.' Leniana waved his concern off.

'Syld threatened to gouge his eyeballs out.'

'But I didn't, did I?' Syld snapped at him, making him flinch. It was the first rush of blood again, coming back to herself.

'Who knows what you might have done if I hadn't dragged you out.'

'You don't think you overreacted a bit, no?' Leliana suggested.

She was not made for this. She was no commander. The idea of duty had always been an abhorrent one. Now she felt it all digging into her, this expectation, this eyeglass fixed on all her flaws. The very big one being that she'd never had much patience for a man with authority and that the anger in her didn't need much to spark it.

'Let's just look at this damn board.'

Leliana still carried her old robes, spattered with blood and ripped up the side for easy access to a hidden blade she'd made use of in the tavern scuffle. She looked this way and that, and then handed them to Hobbs and said "go to town" and "don't tell the revered mother". He did the first, and wasn't physically capable of doing the second.

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