As morning came, the caravan was repacked in numb silence, in stark contrast to the celebration the night before. Amell watched this bleary-eyed, sympathetic towards those feeling the after-effects of too much alcohol.
They returned to the road, and the next two days passed uneventfully. It seemed Abeona was pleased by the offering.
To her surprise, Amell discovered that she and Sten did not go back to avoiding each other. It seemed they were instead pretending that nothing had happened, which she suspected was not much of an improvement.
The third day, the road swerved north, into a forest. This put Drust and all of his hired swords on edge; out in the open, as they'd been so far, bandits could not ambush the caravan. The forest, however, offered a seemingly endless number of hidden nooks and crannies, just perfect for concealing not only criminals, but other unexpected dangers.
Amell knew that she and Sten were allowed to join the caravan without pay only on the promise that they would help protect it, so she made a point of keeping an eye out for trouble.
"Does this forest have a name?" she asked Sorrel.
"Don't know. Suppose it does," the woman shrugged. "It doesn't strike me as dangerous, though. Why are you so tense?"
Amell shrugged in turn.
It was nothing like the Brecilian Forest, she reasoned with herself. That one had been markedly different. There'd been a weight in the air, a spiritual tension she'd felt deep in her blood. The Veil was... odd in the Brecilian Forest, threadbare and uneven.
This forest was of a far more harmless variety. The trees were younger and did not give the impression that they were watching Amell, and she also rather doubted they'd be trying to kill her anytime soon. There was more light here and colorful little songbirds flitting from branch to branch. There was the gentle murmur of a stream in the distance, a sweet tinkling sound like laughter. It was almost beautiful here.
But Amell was still apprehensive, despite all this. Things could still go wrong, no matter how pretty the landscape.
By evening, they arrived to a small bridge crossing the stream they'd been hearing. It was here that Drust decided to stop the caravan and set up camp.
"It's terribly cold, isn't it?" Sorrel commented idly.
"Hm? Oh. Yes." Amell pulled her cloak tighter around her.
It wasn't cold, she thought, it was chilly. If it were cold, you could keep it out with blankets and thick clothing, but a chill cut through all that and went straight to your bones. She was reminded of the tombstones they'd occasionally run across while in the Brecilian Forest, of how they seemed to suck in heat and sound like a deep, dark hole.
"I think Dyson might need an extra blanket tonight," Sorrel continued her chatter. "And I best tell him to stay away from the water. He could catch a death of a cold on this weather."
"Death of a cold, yes," Amell repeated absently.
Sorrel narrowed her eyes and gave Amell a sideways look. She could tell when someone wasn't paying attention to her. It was the kind of skill people who talk too much tend to develop.
"Is something wrong?" she asked the mage point-blank.
"Ah, no, nothing's... wrong, exactly," Amell said, choosing her words carefully. "These woods just remind me of... another place."
Which was strange, because for all intents and purposes, this seemed like an aggressively normal forest.
"A bad place?" Sorrel's brows furrowed in worry.
Amell bit back a bitter laugh. Werewolves, spirits, darkspawn, crazy hermits...
"No, just strange, I suppose," Amell shrugged. "Don't mind me."
"You can tell me, you know, if th--" Sorrel cut off abruptly and looked wide-eyed over Amell's shoulder.
Amell sighed and turned around.
"Sten. Is something wrong?" she asked, just as Sorrel mumbled something about finding Dyson and slunk off.
"Everything seems peaceful for now," he answered, in a tone of voice implying he expected enemies to jump out from behind a rock any second now. "Unless you are given cause to think otherwise?"
"No, no. I was just... thinking. Don't--"
"Mind you," he finished her statement. "It is what you always say when something is bothering you."
"Do I?" she wondered. She hadn't realized she was that transparent. "Nothing's wrong, Sten. This place just reminds me of the Brecilian Forest. I..."
She missed it, strangely enough. For all that mess with the Dalish and Zathrian and the Lady of the Forest, she missed those few days spent slowly picking their way through the trees. She had a brief, but vivid memory of the sun streaming down through the leaves as Wynne chided Alistair for something; he laughed and then Amell told both of them to be quiet, because she thought that bush over there had looked at her funny (and predictably, this only made Alistair burst into yet louder laughter)...
She hadn't realized it before, how sharply and deeply she missed her friends. This sadness came upon her so quickly, that the forest seemed to be spinning and she knew that couldn't be right, because it wasn't a magical forest, so it had no excuse.
Amell reached out and placed her hand on Sten's arm, steadying herself. The mail was cold beneath her fingers.
"Could you stay close by, for a little while?" she asked, gaze firmly planted to the ground. Obediently, the forest floor stopped spinning, so she chanced a look up.
"I have no other business to attend to," Sten answered.
Amell nodded shakily, not trusting her voice to thank him.
* * *
It was only after Amell was woken by raised voices that she realized she'd fallen asleep, leaning against the wheel of a wagon. She blinked blearily and the campfire came into focus, as well as other details; she was sitting on a blanket and Sten was standing next to her, watching something across the camp.
She unsteadily got to her feet, pulling her cloak tighter around her.
"What's going on?" she asked, her voice still husky from sleep.
"It appears a child was lost," Sten answered, then looked at her. "Did they wake you?"
Amell blinked, but didn't answer. Instead her attention was drawn to the angry female voice in the dispute, because it sounded familiar.
"Is that... Sorrel? Sten, is Dyson lost?" She woke up fully in alarm.
"It appears so."
Amell advanced towards the verbal altercation, now worried.
"You promised! You promised we'd be safe!" Sorrel was screaming, fists balled and tears out outrage in her eyes. "You said you had the safest caravan on the route!"
"And I do," Drust grumbled in reply. He stood there with his arms folded, looking unmoved by the woman's plight. "If the boy wandered off on his own, it's his own damn fault. Or maybe yours, for not reining him in."
"You-- you villain!" Sorrel screeched and launched herself at Drust.
Amell promptly jumped in, grabbing Sorrel's arms from behind and pulling her back.
"Sorrel, no! Calm down, you'll get yourself in trouble!" Amell hissed, holding the struggling woman as tightly as she could. For her efforts, she received an elbow to the ribs and a kick to the shin, but she still did not let Sorrel out of her grip. "Tell me what's wrong, Sorrel, I'll help you."
Drust watched this display dispassionately, his expression frozen in a scowl.
Sorrel finally calmed down, by a given definition of calm, because she stopped her violent outburst and instead started crying. Amell gently guided Sorrel as far away as possible from the infuriating man.
Finally, in the dim firelight, Sorrel slumped against a wagon, hiding her face in the crook of her arm. She looked almost as if she were the seeker in a game of hide and seek, if not for the muffled sobs that racked her body.
Amell sighed. She reached up her sleeve, where she always kept a handkerchief (a habit one of her teachers at the Circle had insisted upon, when she'd been a very young apprentice; it was apparently "lady-like" to always have a handkerchief) and, delicately prying Sorrel away from the wagon, she handed the white textile to her. Sorrel blinked wetly before accepting it and wiping her eyes.
"Sorrel, what happened?" Amell asked.
"D-Dyson's gone," Sorrel answered, her lip quivering as if she were ready to burst into another bout of crying.
"What do you mean gone? How long since you've seen him? Have you searched the whole camp for him?" Amell persisted. The whole caravan must have numbered about two dozen wagons, not that Amell had had the opportunity to count them all, and one small boy could easily be lost among so many people, goods and animals.
"He's gone! He's really gone!" Sorrel shook her head. "I haven't seen him since we stopped and I went and asked everyone and nobody's seen him, nobody knows where he is!"
"Alright, calm down," Amell raised her hands in an appeasing gesture. "I will go and look for him, alright? I'll talk to Drust, myself. You just... stay here and calm down."
A flimsy plan, perhaps, but Amell was used to improvisation by now. She turned and nearly ran into Sten.
"Ah, there you are," she remarked, startled that he'd followed her so quietly. "Could you perhaps stay here and keep Sorrel out of trouble?" she asked low, tilting her head in the woman's direction.
"As you wish, kadan," came the reply.
Amell nodded absently and made her way back to Drust.