Disclaimer: I don't own Dragon Age or any of its related characters. This is just for my own enjoyment and the potential enjoyment of other fans like me, and no monetary gain was expected or received.
Rating: T
Spoilers: May contain spoilers for Origins, Awakening, and Dragon Age II as well as the novels The Stolen Throne and The Calling.
No Bull From the Big Bull, Volume One, by Varric Tethras, a Humble Storyteller
Excerpt: Being An Account of the Meeting of Ser Cauthrien Landsman, Bann of Gwaren
Cauthrien wiped the sweat from her brow with a thin, brown arm, bare almost to the shoulder beneath the ragged cuffs of her plain peasant's blouse. She was tired and hungry and damnably thirsty, her throat seemingly coated with chaff, but there was no stopping until the wheat was all cut - even this brief moment to catch her breath and rest her tired arms from the weight of the scythe ran the risk of retribution later, particularly if Da' was drunk. And Da' was always drunk.
The bruises from the last such "lesson" her father had imparted to her when deep in his cups were livid purple and tender, painful. The one over her eye made it hard to see what she was doing, the ones on her arms made it all the harder to wield the heavy reaper. But it was better to be out here than in the little ramshackle hovel, even if she was exhausted.
Her ears perked to the raucous sounds of men talking loudly, some distance away. She looked up. Uh-oh, highwaymen, the same band of thugs that had been using the bend in the road at the end of her field as an ambush for unwary travelers. She turned her attention back to her work, praying to the Maker that they would not notice her. She counted on her ragged clothes, originally made for her older brother who was dead now, run over by a lumber wagon when he staggered drunk into its path outside the local tavern, and her skinny, under-nourished frame, to disguise her gender and render her both harmless and uninteresting to the men. They'd been there every day for nearly a week, now, and thus far it had worked.
She didn't know how long she worked - with the chaff in her throat and the pain in her bruises and the hot sun beating down, every minute she labored felt like an eternity - but eventually her ears caught the clop of hooves on the hard-beaten track. And if she heard the approaching unfortunate, then it was a dead surety that the bandits heard, too.
She didn't want to see - she'd witness two such ambushes, and the highwaymen left their victims dead in the ditch, and the rotting, fly-blown corpses of such unlucky sods were an all-too-common sight along Ferelden roads - but she was compelled by human nature to look up and watch disaster unfold. She wanted to shout a warning, but that would only turn the thugs' attention to her. Helpless and miserable, she stood there with her scythe hanging almost forgotten in her hands.
It was a lone rider, which was odd enough - few were so foolish as to travel the bannorn without backup, so this man was either sublimely arrogant or dead stupid, which perhaps worked out to the same thing in the end - and the look of him was as nothing she'd ever seen before. She realized by his shining silverite plate and the fine heavy-bodied and stout-legged warhorse he mounted that he must be a knight, in service to one of the local lords or perhaps the King himself. Strangely he wore no helmet, and his long black hair flew in the stiff north wind. Fine as his armor was, it fitted oddly, as if badly remade to his measurements. He rounded the bend and the thugs were upon him.
Perhaps it was the protection of the plate he wore that made him foolhardy, but there were more than enough bandits to put paid to one armored knight, and the bulging saddlebags he carried, marked with the seal of the Royal Treasury, were an irresistible target. Evidently he was making a run from the offices of the local tax collector, carrying the gold back to Denerim. Usually such a task fell to an entire company of soldiers, not one lone knight. She realized that her money was in that bag, money she'd sweated and labored to earn while her father drank, and the idea that these wretched murderers would have it made her furious. It wasn't right that they killed, that they took what others had struggled and bled for, and it was time somebody stopped them. Blinded by her rage, she charged the bandits, scythe swinging, bellowing out the first war cry she had ever uttered.
The cry and her momentum both faltered before she reached the melee. The thugs were dead, slaughtered with brutal efficiency, almost too quickly to fathom. The knight wiped the blood from his sword, returned it to the sheath he carried in harness on his back, and remounted his patient steed. The horse whickered softly as if to say "all in a day's work."
Cauthrien had never seen anything like it: death done beautifully, almost like a dance. She stopped and stared, bug-eyed, as the knight made ready to travel on. She had to speak, had to say something, just to make the memory indelible in her mind.
"Oy, Ser, that was bloody fantastic! You must be as tough as the sodding Hero of River Dane!" she cried out.
The knight chuckled quietly and looked at her for the first time. He had eyes the color and temperature of winter skies. "Not quite," he said, "but almost. I thank you for your assistance."
Cauthrien shrugged. "I didn't do nothing, Ser. You left nothing for me to do."
"On the contrary, you assisted me greatly. You provided a very effective distraction, otherwise things might have gone rather harder for me."
He looked her up and down, and his mount stepped off the roadway and into the field toward her, urged on by a gentle twitch of the reins. "Maker's breath, that's a young lady under all those bruises and dirt, isn't it? Tell me, pup - who is it has been pummeling you, eh?"
She blushed and dropped her eyes to the dirt and her bare toes. "It's nothing, Ser. Everybody's Da' beats on 'em a little, 'specially when they drink."
"Not everybody's father beats his children," he said. He set his mouth in a hard, grim line as he surveyed the damage, the puffy black bruises around one dark brown eye, the marks of hard hands and harder fists all up and down both arms. His own father had been firm with him but had never raised a hand to him in anger - and perhaps there were those who would say he would be a better man now if he had been knocked around a little once or twice as a child, but this? This was cruelty, plain and simple. And cowardice, a weak man taking out his anger at the world on the one handy creature weaker than he. Though not, he suspected, for very much longer. This little bundle of twigs and straw was going to grow into a mighty oak tree one day, unless he missed his guess.
"What's your name, pup?" he asked.
"Cauthrien Landsman, Ser." She vaguely remembered something her mother had once told her about good manners, and sketched a rough and awkward mock-curtsey. "At your service."
It made him smile a bit, at any rate. "Loghain Mac Tir, at yours."
Maker's Breath! Loghain Mac Tir, the sodding Hero of River Dane himself! Cauthrien was boggled at the notion that such as he would even deign to notice someone as lowly as herself, and now what was he doing? Was he handing her a flask?
"You look about done in, Cauthrien Landsman. Water?"
Cauthrien was completely numb, but her dehydrated body cried out for fluid and she took the flask from his hand and drank down the contents greedily. She remembered just in time not to drink it all, and handed it back with mumbled thanks, shame-faced.
"You were thirsty, weren't you? Shouldn't be working out here in this sun without water, it's like to kill you." And he drank down the remainder of the water himself. That utterly dumbfounded Cauthrien - that the Hero of River Dane would speak to her was one impossibility, that he would actually drink after her was another even more incredible impossibility. He didn't even wipe off the mouth of the flask, first!
"Have you got a mother, Cauthrien Landsman, or just a drunken Da'?" he asked, and it took her some time to recover enough wit to respond.
"My Mam drowned herself in the river when I was small, Ser," she said. "It's just me and Da' now that Brother is dead."
"How old are you, pup?"
"Firteen, Ser."
"Thirteen. Too young for soldiering…but just about right for squiring. I don't have a squire, and damned if I haven't found its almost impossible to get on without one. How about it, Cauthrien Landsman? It's three hots and a cot, at the very least, and if you do well at it then eventually you'll be a knight, if you care about that sort of thing."
Thunderstruck, she could only gape at him dumbly for a long moment, until finally she managed to gasp out, "But Ser…I'm a girl!"
"And of what consequence is that?" he countered. "Some of the best knights and soldiers I've had the honor to fight alongside were 'girls,' Cauthrien Landsman. You've got pluck, and I think you've got grit; a bit of training and you'll suit well enough, I imagine. It's honorable work, and while I can't guarantee you'll not come away every bit as bruised and sore as you are now, at least they'll be bruises you earned, bruises that show the effort you've put into making something of yourself, not marks left by a ham-handed fool who can't control his fists or his vices. I'm offering you a hand up out of the nameless, faceless masses, Cauthrien Landsman; not something I do often and not an offer I'll ever repeat. It's your choice."
To make it official he extended a literal hand to her, and after a moment she placed her own much smaller hand in it. "I'm…supposed to finish the reaping," she said.
He jerked his chin in the direction of the tiny hovel on the far edge of the field. "That your house, Cauthrien Landsman?"
"Yes, Ser."
He pulled her up onto the horse's back and deposited her in the saddle before him, as easily as if she weighed nothing at all, and turned the animal in the direction of her miserable little home. "Then let's go tell dear old Da' he'll have to find someone else to sweat the harvest this year." Cauthrien clung awkwardly to the pommel and sat there, unable to believe the strange turn the road of her life had taken, and not too young to feel an odd little thrill at sitting there with the Hero of River Dane all around her, it seemed, massive at her back and his enormous arms reaching past her to the reins.
Da' staggered out of the shack as they rode up, hands balled into belligerent fists. "Cauthrien! What are you doing lollygagging about like this? I still see standing wheat in that field, you useless whelp!"
She hid her face in both hands, humiliated by him and for him, and the Hero of the River Dane did the talking.
"Your daughter is coming with me, Ser, as I have need of a squire. She'll be provided for out of my pocket, and here - " he flung a small shower of silver at the drunk - "is enough coin to hire someone to finish out the farmwork for you, although it looks to me as if you could do it easily enough yourself if you'd put down the bottle long enough to pick up the scythe."
The man blinked stupidly at the coins, and then at his daughter and the man she rode with, then finally broke into a leering grin.
"I see how it is," he said. "I reckon she'd be pretty enough if you could keep her from wallowing in filth long enough to bugger her. A man needs a little bellywarmer, don't he? And I'll be honest with you, Ser, this is more coin than the little bitch is worth. Mind you keep a close eye on her, though - she's a little fucking whore, just like her mother."
And just like that, the sword was in the big man's hand again and laid crosswise against her father's jutting adam's apple. "Granted, if a man rode up with my daughter in his saddle, I'd have him strung up by his hams and gutted before he could say ought. But you, Ser, disgust me on general principles, and I'm well aware of the habit of such base and depraved individuals to ascribe their own sins and vices onto everyone they meet. Know this - if I ever learn that you used more than just your hands on your daughter, I will kill you, if I must come from the ends of the bloody Void to do it. You can set your warrant on it."
He sheathed his sword again, turned the horse, and that was the last Cauthrien Landsman ever saw of her dear old Da'. She never felt the loss of him, not once.