A/N: I'm not here. Not really. But I rediscovered this last night, in the depths of my harddrive. I'm at a point in the whole snowed-under-by-life thing where I could really use some encouragement to find writing fun again, so, you know, sing out if you think this is worth carrying on with.
Not that I'm able to make any commitments, dammit.
title: Blood and Rhetoric, Chapter 1.2
characters: Leonie Caron, for now. Potentially full cast.
rating: T.
words: c1500
exegesis: Courtesy of Orlesian politics, Leonie Caron is despatched to Ferelden after Kallian Tabris has dealt with the Architect and the Mother. Chapter 1.2: Leonie Caron meets a fellow-traveller.
Val Royeaux, Orlais.
Justinian, 9:31 Dragon.
After the Sanglante, the sour bilge-odour of the docks could have been fine Antivan perfume to Caron's nose. Better than Antivan perfume: salt air and rotting weed never made her sneeze. She grinned as the lemon-faced chevalier - scarcely old enough to shave, and already disapproving - in charge of her three-man escort dabbed at his upper lip with a scented kerchief. Boy's never smelled a battlefield.
The guard detail amused her in its superfluity. She would have left on Guy de Boismarron's word alone, and if she wanted to stay -
Well, it took more than four men to take a Warden down.
They made an odd procession, threading their way through the bales and carts crowding the wharves. Hoarse-voiced pursers shrieked, barefoot sailors - hair done back in tarred queues - hauled, cattle lowed and pigs shrieked. Grubby children and slender elves darted through the tumult. The disapproving chevalier in his polished, creaking armour and well-oiled quiff was as out of place as a qunari in the Arbour Wilds. The three guards - two with their hands on their swordhilts, the third carrying the sword that would be returned to her as soon as she left Orlesian soil - gleamed only slightly less in the red evening sun. De Boismarron had ensured that Caron had received a clean tunic and doublet in Warden colours for her departure, but beside her escort, she was a gaunt, straw-haired scarecrow, tall and scarred and weathered. A starveling wolf beside well-groomed hounds.
The comparison widened her grin. Exile was a light burden to bear, all things considered: she refused to brood away a heartbeat of the time she had left under the sun in pining and regrets.
"Warden," Sieur Lemon-Face said, at the gangplank of a Kirkwall-built caravel. Faded letters traced the name Swift across her bow. "Your ship."
There was a steward present, and a couple of barefoot sailors, checking netted bales against a list. A net of sacks dangled in midair from a hoist ran between blocks rigged from the maintop, being swayed up and into the waist by a team of sweating sailors. One of the dockside sailors wiped his hands on his tunic and sauntered towards them. "Help you, lords and lady?" he offered in the common tongue.
The chevalier's expression grew, if possible, even more sour. "This woman," he said, his Orlesian icy, "is to take passage on this vessel to Highever. See that she goes aboard."
The sailor eyed the chevalier. "This'd be the lady Warden, then? Right, then." And to Caron, still in the common tongue: "Pleasure, serrah. You be right timely: we'm nobbut an hour before the tide. Purser, he got your kit stowed aft: I'd be right glad to get you squared away."
"Thank you," Caron said. And to the chevalier, making her tone deliberately mild. "Thank you for your escort, m'sieur. My blade, if you please."
He spat at her feet, but waved the guard to hand over her sword. With it belted securely once more at her hip, she inclined her head the sailor. "Lead on, if you please."
"Go below, serrah?" he asked, as he handed her lightly onto the deck's pale boards. "Captain'll want to give you greeting after we'm underway, but himself's a mite distracted just the now."
Caron shook her head. Four days' close confinement disinclined her to exchange one cramped space for another. "I'll stay on deck, if I'm not in the way."
This proved acceptable. The sailor - who named himself as Bran, originally of Cumberland - led her to the bow and left her there, with dire but heartfelt warnings to keep her hands away from the lines, the belaying-pins - from anything remotely to do with the running of the ship. Hunger snarled in her stomach. She ignored it and leaned elbows on the rail, gazing idly down at the wharf. The breeze that clamoured in the shrouds and bore the keening gulls aloft trailed light fingers across her nape. Sieur Lemon-Face still stood at the foot of the gangplank, arms crossed, staring up at her. No doubt he intended to wait until the Swift had cast off, and had passed beyond any distance from which she could even swim to shore before he left the wharf.
For the first time, she put the thought in words. Orlais is no longer my home.
Despite all her resolve, it soured her temper.
"He looks a remarkably ill-tempered sort, even for a chevalier," a mild voice remarked at her shoulder. Caron tamped down an instinctive twitch towards her weapon. The speaker had light footsteps. Wood creaked as she settled at the rail an arm's length aft of Caron, and tilted her head towards the wharf. "Friend of yours?"
Caron snorted. "Not in the least." She eyed the newcomer sidelong. The robes of a Chantry sister - the bright orange embroidery sun-faded, the brown wool worn and nubbed with use - bunched in slack folds around her wrists, hiding her hands where they rested on the rail. Her hair, an unusually vivid red in hue, framed her jawline in a boyish bowl. The breeze strayed thin strands across her cheek. And I have fifteen years on her if I've a day. "May I assume you're also bound for Highever, Sister? Bringing," dryly, "good Andrastean aid and succour to the Blighted lands?"
"That is what good Andrasteans do, is it not?" the sister agreed, easily. A fleeting wryness creased her lips, and something else, something that Caron couldn't quite identify. Amusement, perhaps. "You must be the Warden. It seems we two are the only passengers. The ship has been quite buzzing with rumours about you since this morning. Have you ever travelled to Ferelden before?"
"Not across the border. As far as Jader, only." And sitting in Jader's rustic confines for a year while a Blight raged just across the border, with only occasional bands of scattered darkspawn to hunt for diversion, had been damnably frustrating. Worse, her lack of direct knowledge might yet prove troublesome. Map-learning is all well and good, but the map is not the territory. She would have to travel from Highever to Amaranthine: Caron rather doubted the Ferelden Wardens were expecting her arrival, if de Boismarron had indeed arranged for her to be marched aboard the first ship leaving Val Royeaux. Guy, you'd best have sent me travelling funds. "I doubt I'll find a warm welcome."
"You might be surprised." The sister tilted her head consideringly. For the first time, Caron had a clear view of more than just her profile, and she revised her estimate of the sister's age upwards. Not a girl, a woman. The crinkles at the corner of her blue-green eyes and the thin white scar that trailed along her hairline belonged to someone who'd had time to grow out of the first flush of youth. "I think you'll find that Grey Warden outweighs Orlesian in Ferelden, these days."
Caron's eyebrows lifted. "You know the country well?" That would be odd, for an Orlesian sister, unless she was border-bred.
To her astonishment, the sister laughed. Long, and hard, almost doubled over the rail with the force of her merriment. "Forgive me, Warden," she managed after a moment, knuckling tears from the corner of her eye. "Know it well? I spent more than a year travelling Ferelden's roads, from the Wilds to the Frostbacks. I have maps engraved behind my eyelids and Fereldan mud in my bones." She straightened, her humour subsiding into pensiveness. Softly, she said, "I did not think I would miss it so much, when I left Denerim. But life surprises us all, no?"
That it does. But the wistfulness in the sister's voice surprised her. "You were there during the Blight? A Chantry sister from Orlais?" When petty politics kept the entire Order stuck in Jader with their thumbs up their asses, because we couldn't afford to annoy either the empress or the Fereldans' bloody regent. Maker, we should have asked the Divine for robes.
"I may have lived most of my life in Orlais, but I am Ferelden born." An expressive shrug. "As for Chantry sister - true, as far as it goes, but I'm not an affirmed sister, Warden. Merely a lay one."
Caron bit her lower lip and stared down. A hand of water showed in the shadow between the ship's hull and the wooden piling of the wharf, dark and oily, thick with weed and murk. The water struck her as an apt metaphor for her understanding of the land that was to become her home. It irked her pride. "Perhaps I might prevail upon you to instruct me concerning Ferelden, if it should not inconvenience you, before we make landfall at Highever?" Wryly: "If rumour has reached you, it no doubt included the fact that my departure was planned in haste."
"And your shocking duel with Sieur de Guillac had nothing to do with it," the sister agreed, straight-faced. Bird-like, she tilted her head and widened her blue eyes guilelessly. "I will be glad to help you. But - how shocking! - we have yet to be properly introduced!"
A sense of humour, this one. Like poor dead Kristoff, the long months in Jader, whose light mocking courtesy had held them all sane. Caron swallowed her chuckle and, solemn, made as graceful a leg as the ship's deck permitted. "Forgive my rudeness, Sister. I am Leonie Caron, Warden. Might I have the honour of your name?"
"My name," the sister said, with the air of one bestowing possession of a secret, "is Leliana."