Hall scrambled through the door and scanned the tavern for familiar faces. He was startled not to find Rion, Korbin, Thornton, or Cillian anywhere in the common room. Wasn't this where they'd been supposed to meet? Was he so late that they had given up on him? Or had he somehow arrived late, but before any of his friends? (Or comrades-in-arms, at least. He was having trouble figuring out the difference.)
He tentatively approached the dwarven bartender and performed the still-novel exchange of coin for beverage. Beer in hand, he stood in front of the bar, sipping his drink, nervously shifting his weight from foot to foot, and watching the door for any sign of his friends. At the sound of heavy footsteps behind him, he whirled, hand reaching for a bow that he had left in the barracks.
He found himself looking at the mammoth pectoral muscles of an equally gargantuan Qunari. Hall craned his neck back to look at the giant's face. He wore an eyepatch over his left eye, a scruffy beard, and a set of parallel scars under his right eye. This must be the mercenary leader and Inquisitorial bodyguard he'd heard about, with some fanciful name. The Metal Bear? No, that didn't sound quite right.
"Are you looking for the others? The dwarf, the old archer, and the two mages?" the Qunari asked. "They said you were supposed to meet them here."
"Where are they?" Hall asked tentatively. He couldn't help himself from an absurd thought: did you eat them?
"Probably on their way to some old ruin or army camp," the colossus said, with a low chuckle. "They hadn't even had time to order drinks when Leliana came through the door like something was on fire. She yelled that she needed a team and they'd do as well as any, and practically dragged them out the door."
"Oh," Hall said, disappointed. He didn't envy his fellows their night march to some doubtless nightmarish destination, but had been looking forward to having drinks with them. (Even if, he had to admit, it had been a struggle for him to work up the courage to actually show up. That was probably what had seized him to start restringing his bow just before they were scheduled to meet.)
"Need a drinking partner?" the Qunari asked, pointing an elbow at the nearly full mug of beer in Hall's hand. "My men are out on a mission of their own, and drinking alone's no good."
Hall almost turned him down. He was finding the muscular Qunari almost impossibly intimidating. But after the effort of will he'd made to show up, the thought of going back to an empty barracks was depressing. "All right," he said.
"Drinking partners should know each other's names," the other said, waving Hall toward a table. "I'm the Iron Bull." Ah, I was close.
"That sounds more like a title than a name," Hall pointed out.
"It's what I've got. You'll have to live with it," the Bull said amicably. "And you?"
"I'm Hall. Not the Hall, just Hall."
"So, Hall," the Bull said, as they settled into chairs, "where do you hail from? Your accent sounds almost Dalish.'
No one had ever placed his accent before, or at least, no one had mentioned it. "I was raised by a Dalish hunter," Hall said. He closed his eyes for a moment, remembering Fanora's hands guiding his to the right positions on his bow, a miniature version of her own.
"A Dalish living among humans?" the Bull asked, waving at the barmaid for a drink. "That seems unusual."
"Ah, no," Hall said. "I was a human living among the Dalish."
"That strikes me as even more unusual," the Bull said, accepting a tankard nearly the size of Hall's head. "I'm surprised that her clan would permit such a thing."
"They didn't want to, but Fanora - the one who found me - insisted. She kept me there for years, despite the Keeper's complaints. But when I started to get my full growth, she took me out and left me alone in the forest."
"Poor lad," the Bull said. "How did you react?"
Hall hunched his shoulders, thinking back to those days. This was another question he'd never been asked. The few times he'd told the story before, his listener had reacted with shock and then change the subject. "I was scared, and angry at her. I didn't understand how she could abandon me. But once I had time to think about it… I'm sure the Keeper gave her a choice, me or the clan. I can't blame her for not giving up everything for me."
'Where did you go?" the Bull asked. He kept up a steady line of gentle questioning, leaving enough gaps for Hall to gradually down his beer. By the time his mug was empty, he had told the Iron Bull his entire life story, and his only regret was that it wasn't more exciting.
"You're out of drink," the Bull observed in a disapproving tone. Beckoning to the barmaid, he said something softly in her ear that Hall couldn't catch. She nodded and headed for the bar.
"You should meet Dalish," the Iron Bull added lightly.
"You know someone named Dalish?" Hall asked, puzzled.
"It's what we call her. She was also abandoned by her clan. She's, ah, also an archer, though a different kind from you. I think you two would get along."
Hall had barely spoken with one of the People in years. He'd known that if he approached a clan, he wouldn't get a friendly reception. He'd met two Dalish at Skyhold, but while Cillian seemed friendly, his devotion to ancient magics made Hall nervous, and Neria had been downright hostile. "I'd like that," he said quietly.
The barmaid returned with another enormous tankard for the Iron Bull and a somewhat more reasonable-size one for Hall. Hall sniffed at it and recoiled as a burning pain shot through his nose. "Uh, what is this?"
"Drink!" the Bull declared. Hall wasn't sure whether it was an answer or a command.
Hall took a cautious sip and doubled over coughing. Whatever it was, it burned all the way down. The Iron Bull leaned over the table to pound him on the back. Hall wasn't actually sure that was helping.
"Guess the Dalish never let you sample any of their good stuff, did they?" the Bull asked. He took an enormous swig of the pain liquor, then gave a deep-satisfied sounding sigh.
"I don't think the Dalish had anything like this," Hall said. He cautiously tried another sip. He couldn't tell if anticipating the burn made it better or worse.
"Oh, they do," the Bull said, laughing. "Or at least this one clan I met in the Free Marches did. We'd been hired to guard this idiot noble who was dabbling in trade. He was convinced that we could cut days off our journey with a 'short cut' that went right by the Dalish camp. This 'new trade route' was going to make him and his family rich. What an ass."
"What happened?" Hall asked. His third gulp seemed to go down a bit more easily.
"A hundred Dalish arrows aimed right at our faces, that's what happened. The noble kept posturing at them like both right and might were on our side. So I knocked him out and dumped him in a carriage, and Krem negotiated safe passage in exchange for a generous cut of his trade goods. Things got a lot friendlier after that." He laughed again, Hall wasn't sure at what.
The Iron Bull kept on talking, piling ever more improbable stories on top of each other. Hall was beginning to find his voice oddly soothing. The motions of folk around the tavern slowly began to blur and recede, and eventually everything went black….
#
Hall woke up with a pounding headache in a bed that was not his own. Sunlight leaked around the curtain covering the window and bored into his skull. He groaned.
"Drink this," the Iron Bull said cheerily, rising from a chair across the room and approaching the bed with a rough pottery cup. "Old Qunari hangover remedy. Tastes worse than anything you can imagine, but it'll ease the headache."
Hall moaned again. "What happened? I don't remember…"
The Bull dropped his jaw in shock. "You've forgotten our night of passion? I'm appalled!"
Hall sat bold upright in bed. "WHAT?"
The Bull slapped his knee, laughing. The sound sent new spikes of pain through Hall's head. "I actually had you going there? You passed out in the tavern, and I thought you'd rather not wake up slumped over a table there. Even in Skyhold, someone might decide to separate you from your coin pouch. So I carried you up here and tucked you into bed." His visage became morose as he looked into the cup. "I think I just fed your hangover remedy to the carpet. I'll mix you up another."
Hall blearily watched him leave. Apparently, he'd somehow managed to befriend a Qunari. The Inquisition was proving to offer no end of new experiences, but, headache aside, this one had proven more pleasant than most.