PART III

Leliana was tired of waiting. She pressed her mouth against Zevran's ear, breathing warmth into the whorls of its tapered length. "I could distract them. Take out the others, while you corner the mother." Zevran, crouched in the same position he had been for the past five minutes, moved his head slightly in acknowledgement.

At any other time, he would have been the one suggesting strategies, or at least the one whispering into somebody's ear. But he had momentarily forgotten that he was not alone. Leliana had been all but silent the entire way, and clearly, she had been learning—she had followed Zevran's lead without missing a beat from the camp to a crop of Tenvinter ruins on the eastern shores of Lake Calenhad, moving in his tracks with such ease that his mind had quickly turned away from wondering whether she could keep up with him to imagining what he would do to the elves once he caught up with them. Zevran could only guess that she had been observing him for some time. Her training as a bard in Orlais had helped, no doubt. She had fallen into talking in shorthand with minimum use of sibilants almost immediately, her voice pitched low so that it carried only to the ear it was intended for. Clearly, she had done this before.

There was a time when Zevran had been utterly intrigued by Leliana, particularly after their encounter with her former taskmistress. He still did not completely understand why she had put on the Chantry sister act before then, but he liked the changes, even if he no longer found her as irresistibly attractive as he had before. Or at least not as attractive as Daen.

He put that thought aside. There were more pressing matters at hand.

The pair hid behind a cluster of broken stone columns, remains of a Tevinter structure that afforded them some cover from their prey. The prey in question had set up camp in the middle of what had once been an open-air circular building, perhaps something like a large stone version of the gazebos popular in Antiva for stargazing and romantic trysts. All of the columns in the circle were broken, the pieces that had once stacked so neatly together fallen to the ground below, but the most intact one was as tall as the lofty ceilings of Orzammar. Zevran couldn't imagine what the ancient Tevinters needed such giant gazebos for, but rather liked the idea that its size matched their own needs for starlit encounters. One might fit an entire whorehouse and its customers within, he mused, amending: With some flexibility.

The merchant's covered wagon was anchored a scant fifty feet away, while the ox dozed free of its yoke just to the side of the wagon. Gathered around a flickering campfire were the merchant family Oghren had described: A middle-aged elven mother, telltale signs of mixed heritage displayed in the fine lines in her face; three elderly elves, skeletal hands clutching identical woolen cloaks about themselves; and a pair of very young children, one just toddling and the other no older than six, both crowned with a riot of chestnut curls, just like their mother. The older one looked pure elven, while the younger had the distinctive blurring in its features that suggested a mixed heritage. The mother was the only one awake, and she tended the crackling fire as though it was her third child, feeding it with a steady hand while the other absently tucked a spare blanket around her slumbering children's shoulders. No one would have even suspected that they were anything other than a tired family of merchants.

But that, after all, was the point.

The toddler was a little young for a prospective Crow, but the older child was the right age. Zevran himself remembered playing the roles the children currently filled as part of his testing. Children made excellent covers for assassination missions; until they had proven themselves worthy of becoming a Crow, they were mere investments the Crows had made, much like buying a particular poison for a specific mark. The rule was that the prospectives could be used for whatever the Crow needed them for, and that could mean anything from being a living shield to providing comfort to the more depraved Crows at night. The smart prospectives—like Zevran—quickly learned how to do other odd jobs to make themselves more valuable, such as setting traps, massages, or relaying messages. In most cases, they were the ones who lived.

As luck would have it that night, the full moon broke from the clouds at that very moment. Zevran cursed inwardly. A movement at his elbow caught his attention, and he glanced back to see Leliana tying a dark handkerchief over her hair, which shone a brilliant copper in the moonlight before it was obscured by the cloth. Zevran pulled a similar handkerchief from his belt and did the same for his own arrangement of wheat-gold locks, remembering as the cloth slid over his head how Daen had once admired his hair while they set up for camp.

"Your hair is even nicer than a noble's," he remarked, pausing in sharpening his daggers.

It had not been long since Zevran joined the group. He was already used to Daen's apparent non sequitur attempts at getting to know his companions, so he was not surprised. This comment, however, prompted an amused snort from Morrigan.

"'Tis no surprise," she said. "He spends two nobles' worth of time on it every morning."

Zevran ignored Morrigan's baiting, but was not above some fishing of his own. "Would you like to pet it? Feel free, please."

"No, no, that's quite all right. I've just never seen an elf with such nice hair. It's so even and shiny."

"And soft, too. The only soft thing I have on me!" Zevran tilted his head towards the elven Warden, inviting a touch. "I have been told that it feels like Orlesian silk. Several times, I might add. Quite significant, as everyone who said so only had the chance to say it that one time."

"Hah." Daen sheathed his daggers and extended a fingertip to brush at a strand of hair. His touch was so light that Zevran barely felt it. "It's like baby hair."

Zevran feigned an offended look through a gap in the veil of his hair, the corner of his mouth twitching upward. "Baby hair, my dear Grey Warden? You wound me. If only you would let me show you how inaccurate that is." He straightened, flicking his hair away from his face with a deliberately effortless motion. "If you like, I could do something about that interesting nest on your head. Are those birds I see roosting in there?" Daen's hair was a lovely color, like sun-bleached tassels of cornsilk from root to tip, a shade rarely seen past a blond's adolescence. It accentuated the Warden's youthfulness, but it was as wild as a blightwolf, and doing a tremendous job at concealing what Zevran thought might be beautifully sculpted cheekbones.

"Oh, no. I'm fine," Daen demurred, averting his eyes.

"Are you positive? It is no trouble, I assure you. Besides, I have yet to see what your lovely face truly looks like."

Daen shifted his weight, his eyes glued to the toes of his boots. Zevran grinned. Daen was an absolute terror around darkspawn and quite a few humans—and, well, anyone who made attempts on his life—but he dissolved into a little boy at the slightest suggestion. Time to change tack. "And one cannot help but wonder how you spot darkspawn with your hair hanging in your eyes like that."

"I...well, I guess it wouldn't hurt." Daen laughed nervously. "It's been hard to do anything with my hair since my mother died. Honestly, my dad and I have just been cutting our hair with the kitchen shears. And it's been hard to remember to do even that much ever since I joined the Grey Wardens. You know...darkspawn," he said with a wry grin.

"My dear Warden, darkspawn maintain their sorry strands of hair more carefully than you do your entire head," Zevran replied. "Let me get my scissors, and then we shall see what emerges from that head of yours, hmm?"

Unfortunately, the others were listening, and Zevran ended up spending the entire evening trimming everyone's hair except Morrigan's and Sten's. Oghren would not let him near his beard, but requested "a little off the top." Even the dog presented himself for a grooming, a dirty paddle-shaped brush of dubious origin clenched between his drooling jaws.

Zevran deliberately took a bit more time with Daen's hair than he did with the others, insisting on working through each tangle instead of simply cutting them all out. And even though it took only a single restless night to render him completely disheveled, the shyly pleased way that the Warden ran his hand through his neatly shaped hair after the cut had been more than worth it.

Zevran continued to trim Daen's hair every time he noticed it getting shaggy afterwards, making it such a constant ritual that Daen didn't even turn around when he noticed Zevran settling behind him with a pair of scissors in his hand.

"I appreciate it, Zevran, but my hair doesn't grow that quickly," he finally said at one point. There was a pause. Then, suspiciously: "I'm not going to wake up bald one day, am I?"

"Never! You may not have much competition, but it is still my sacred duty to ensure that you are the best-looking Warden in all of Ferelden!" Zevran teased, over an offended "he-ey!" from Alistair. "And a beautiful head of hair suits you much better than either a bald dome or that nug's den you called a hairstyle, no?"

Daen sent Zevran the close-lipped smile that meant he was doing his best not to burst out laughing. "I can just hear it now. After we slay the Archdemon, there will be but one sentence on all of Ferelden's lips: 'Who does his hair...?'"

And then the laughter erupted, tenor notes of mirth bubbling out of him until he was bent in half, his pale hair no longer long enough to hide the flush of pleasure that rose in his cheeks and scaled ambitious heights to touch the tips of his slender ears.

That had certainly been a plus. Especially after I talked him into a massage.

Zevran shook his head, suddenly conscious of the present. The headcovers he and Leliana had donned only removed the eye-catching gleam their hair would have created under the blinding light of the moon, and did nothing for the rest of them. Both of them were still clad in armor more appropriate for fighting in open combat, which meant well-oiled leather and sturdy metalwork capable of catching and throwing light leagues away with just the slightest movement. Outside of the armor, he would not catch the light as much with his swarthy Antivan complexion, but Leliana was another matter. Her fair skin made her practically luminescent. It was a flattering look for her, no doubt, but a detrimental one in their current circumstances.

Zevran, loathe to lose his armor when Crows were involved, bent and scooped up a handful of dirt, rubbing it into the rings and steel grommets of his armor in an attempt to dull their gleam. Leliana frowned and shook her head slightly—the earth was too dry and chalky here to make much of a difference. She beckoned Zevran toward her and whispered again into his ear: "Wait for moon to go down?"

Zevran shook his head as well. "Might take too long," he muttered back.

Leliana blinked in agreement. "Down," she murmured. Nimble fingers worked at his armor, and Zevran lowered himself to his belly so that the grass caught and muffled the sound of the leather piece dropping away from him. "Take top off. Grab dirt." Zevran obediently shrugged his pale cotton undershirt over his head, then pulled up a double handful of the dry stuff.

A flask of water appeared in her hands next, and she upended it into the dirt Zevran extended towards her, the clear liquid sparkling like diamonds as it fell through the air before disappearing in the darkness between the elf's hands. Leliana pulled up handfuls of grass and added that and a few more clumps of earth to the mix, then capped the flask and tucked it away while Zevran gently rubbed his hands together, creating a mud between them.

"Quickly," Leliana whispered, extending her arms. She had removed her own armor as well, and was only clad in her smallclothes and a thickly woven undershirt that skimmed the top of her thighs. All were the same color as the handkerchief covering her head. Zevran thought it was an oddly utilitarian choice for an Orlesian, much less one who loved color as much as Leliana did, but it suited their current purposes. She had also adjusted her dagger holster so that it lay below her shirt but within easy reach through the bottom, hiding the shine of steel from the moon's prying eyes.

"You have done this before," Zevran muttered, giving voice to his earlier diagnosis. Clearly, she did not intend on allowing him to take on the Crow encampment alone. He took a bit of the mud in his hands and smeared it over the ivory skin of Leliana's arm.

Leliana grinned, her teeth aglow like pearls. "Bard," she replied by way of explanation, scooping up her own fingerful of mud.

Soon, they had covered Leliana's exposed skin in a thin layer of mud, dulling her down so that she would blend in well enough as long as she kept low to the earth. The moon was still bright in the sky when they finished, and there would be no clouds to cover it any time soon—every single one had fled, as if Lady Luna herself had insisted on watching what would transpire unobscured. She was in full glory tonight, perhaps her way of taking vengeance upon Zevran's refusal to admire her.

Zevran peered around the corner of the column again to check on their marks. The mother was nodding off, but some mysterious sense of hers seemed to wake her whenever the fire required feeding. Otherwise, there was no sign that they had been noticed.

He turned to Leliana. "Go around. Wait for me to move, then take mother from behind. Get her away from fire," he murmured. Leliana blinked in agreement again, the whites of her eyes bright against the drying mud on her face. She was lighter on her feet, and would be able to cover the distance more quietly than Zevran's heavier tread could. She handed her bow to Zevran, and then balanced herself on the balls of her feet and the tips of her fingers, creeping away as silently as a cat on the prowl. Zevran took a moment to appreciate her rounded hindquarters before they disappeared around another broken column. Daen didn't have much to appreciate in that area besides bones and a few scars.

He found himself apologizing mentally. Not that they aren't nice bones, amora. And the scars add character.

Zevran hooked Leliana's bow crosswise over his torso before creeping forward as well, moving directly from the column to insinuate himself below the covered wagon. Once safely out of sight, he removed the bow and placed it on the grass beside him. The wagon's wooden underbelly sagged with the weight of whatever wares the Crows hawked as part of their cover—most likely more barrels of spirits, and probably more than a few laced with various poisons as a precaution, although he doubted any more were poisoned with elfbane. There must have already been a fortune's worth in the one barrel Oghren received.

To his left, the heavy hooves of the ox stood as immovable as mountains, the bovine deep in its own dreams. It likely had as much a chance of waking as Daen did after eating his fill of Alistair's rabbit stew. Zevran never could understand why the Warden liked the rabbit stew so much—it tasted just like the rest of Alistair's stews to him—but Daen practically inhaled it every time, saying that it was much better than his cousin's rabbit stew.

Don't eat the rabbit in Denerim. Noted.

Zevran scowled. Nagale! he reprimanded himself sharply. You are doing everything except focusing on the task at hand. No doubt Leliana was on the verge of circling back to see what was taking him so long. Everything here had a way of reminding him of Daen, somehow. You want to think of the Warden? Fine, think of this. He forced the last glimpse he had had of Daen's face before departing into his mind, and felt his head clear in an instant.

Keep that focus, or else you will never see that face again.

His hand went to one of the stilettos he kept hidden in the sides of his boots and slid it out with his fingertips. He treated the matched pair daily with a basic Crow poison meant to stun and confuse—a single stab would leave a full-grown human reeling long enough for Zevran to take him down to size, either for total disabling or later interrogation. The stilettos had been with him since his first days as a trainee, and it had been so long that he almost thought of them as a married couple. He was not in the habit of naming his weapons as the Fereldens seemed to love doing at the drop of a hat—and they were already so much a part of him that names were simply unnecessary—but they had yet to let him down. He had no idea how effective the poison would be on an ox nearly five times the weight of the average man, but even if all it did was give the animal a little indigestion, it was worth chancing.

He slithered forward on his bare belly and peered out from under the ledge of the wagon. A glance upward easily revealed a thick, throbbing vein in the ox's rear upper thigh. He studied the vein briefly, estimating the depth of the vein and thickness of the skin, and how quickly and heavily he would need to strike. The angle would make things difficult; the pressure of what depended on a successful blow made things interesting.

But when have I backed down from a challenge, hmm?

Zevran struck at an upward angle, the narrow point of the stiletto sinking squarely into the knotted blue cord under the animal's skin.

It was a beautiful strike, and the results were instantaneous. The ox jumped, bellowing like an Anderfel horn, the sudden clenching of its muscles around the tip of the stiletto nearly wrenching the narrow blade from Zevran's grasp. Zevran tightened his grip and withdrew the blade—it wouldn't do to have the ox go bumbling away with an obvious dagger sticking from its haunches—and rolled out from under the wagon on the side opposite from the campfire. He heard sleepy cries of confusion while the ox's hooves stomped and kicked at the ground. The animal screamed and bucked, every strike of its hooves like muffled thunder on the ground. Perhaps the poison had exacerbated the pain of the original wound.

Zevran caught up Leliana's bow, grabbed the lip of the wagon, and swung himself into the bed of the wagon itself, slipping the stiletto back into his boot. He quickly found a narrow tear in the canvas of the canopy, perfectly placed for assessing the damage outside and finding the next target. Leliana would be moving soon; the others would need to be dealt with. Outside, the ox had stopped thrashing about and lay still on the ground, legs extended at stiff angles; one of the elder elves was at its head, stroking a twitching ear. The toddler was sitting wide-eyed and wreathed in a blanket by the fire, one grubby hand stuck into its mouth and the other wound through its curls. Strange to leave the shield just sitting there. Of the others, there was strangely no sign. That would mean an ambush, unless he ambushed them first.

Take out the elder fast; the child is just collateral to them. Zevran snagged Leliana's bow with one hand and caught up a handful of arrows from the quiver with the other. With his boots hooked on a filled barrel large enough to hide Oghren, armor included, inside—and full of enough alcohol to keep the dwarf happy for a few days, it felt like—he leaned back out of the opening of the wagon bed, nocked the bow, and caught the gray-haired elf in his sights. Her skin was like parchment, creased with the signs of a hard life. The disguise was really quite good, and it couldn't be anything but; there were no Crows as old as she looked.

The arrow was set loose with a hiss of broken air. Leliana might be able to outshoot him any day, but he could not miss at this distance. The elf collapsed over the neck of the ox, Leliana's distinctive striped fletching trembling in her neck. He released his hold on the barrel immediately and went tumbling out of the wagon, running with bent knees towards the corpse and the toddler. The child was in the same pose it had been in when he last saw it, and it seemed to have not completely registered what had happened to the elder elf. He scooped it up in his arms and turned on his toes, pausing only long enough to check that the elder elf was dead, before running back to the cover of the wagon.

Something the size of his knuckle went whistling by his ear, hitting a spoke on a wagon wheel with a sharp thunk and falling to the ground. Zevran ignored the near miss and hoisted the toddler into the back of the wagon, tucking it between two barrels, before ducking back behind the wagon. He fell to a crouch behind a wheel and peered out cautiously, daggers drawn.

There was still no sign of the other two elders and the older child, but he saw a thin pair of legs kicking on the opposite side of the fire. They suddenly seemed to disappear behind a broken column—all in total silence. If Zevran hadn't caught his one glimpse of the abduction, he would have missed it completely. He gave a feral smile. He would join Leliana for the interrogation shortly.

A child's thin wail pierced the air. "Ou te mett mamen?" it cried. "Mamen!"

Orlesian? Not Antivan? The lilting language was unmistakable—Leliana spoke with the same slightly nasal accent. Something is not completely right here.

The voice's owner appeared—the older child, a strip of leather clutched in one fist and a rock held tight in the other. Its wide-eyed gaze was locked in the direction Leliana had spirited the mother away to, and it wavered on the spot, unsure if it should follow. Zevran frowned—he would have liked to avoid hurting the children, but Orlesian or no, the child's openness meant a trap.

Ah, well. You would not have made it as a Crow if you allowed yourself to be used as bait in such a way, child. Consider this a favor.

Zevran had an arrow nocked and the child in his sights when he felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. He rolled to the side instinctively, dodging the first strike and barely blocking the second with a dagger. He lashed out at his hooded attacker with his boots and rolled again, backwards and out of the cover of the wagon's bulk.

And now things get interesting.

It was one of the old ones—her hood had fallen as she followed Zevran into the light of the fire, and her face was wild with a pinched desperation. Not really the face of a Crow. For the second time that night, Zevran felt a tingle in his scalp that meant that something was wrong.

But if she didn't look like a Crow, she certainly fought well enough to be one. She crouched low with a dexterity belying her age, and Zevran only had just enough warning to skip backwards before she lashed out with a rapier from below her cloak. He barely registered its tip slicing through his abdomen, leaving a horizontal cat-scratch of a mark. Zevran fell back on one of his favorite strategies—taunting the opponent—and slipped around to the opposite side of the campfire, keeping its flickering light between them.

"A very fancy weapon," he called out, eyes narrowed and arm raised below his nose to prevent the fire's glow from destroying his night vision. "Do not tell me that that is all you brought to this fight, nona!"

The elderly elf attempted to circle around the fire towards him; he crab-walked to the opposite side again. She hissed, the slender length of her rapier flashing. "You have chosen the wrong elves to rob, corsa," she called out, the Orlesian overtone unmistakable.

"And you have chosen the wrong Warden to poison. Where is the Crow who paid you to sell your wares here?"

The rapid blinking that followed his question suggested confusion. "Poison? Non. We are not poisoners." She lowered the tip of her rapier. "We are but merchants from Orlais. Darkspawn pushed us here from the Imperial Highway."

"Oh?" He could not stop smiling. "Amusing."

"Please believe me, serah. There is no need for us to fight." The elf held her hands towards him, palms open.

"Zevran, behind you!"

Leliana's warning gave him enough time to throw himself to the side. The fire flared impossibly bright. The world died away into a haze of black.

Note on Antivan and Orlesian: From what I can tell, Antivan is based on a mix of Italian and Spanish and I assume Orlesian is basically French. Some of the words used in Beak (e.g. nagale, brasca, and more notably amora) are actually from the game, but the rest, both Antivan and Orlesian, is me making stuff up. I apologize if they don't quite match DA universe linguistics. I tweaked things so that the languages don't correspond exactly to IRL standard Italian/Spanish or French, but if you have a background in them, the similarities will be pretty obvious. [Modified for clarification 11/28/2012. -K]

But I can't get fancy with grammar and structure, it just doesn't work.

Antivan:
Nona = grandmother

Orelsian:
Corsa = brigand, bandit (or pirate...which Zev clearly is, arrr)
Ou te mett mamen? = Where are you taking mother?

Until next time. -K