Chapter 7: Everybody Hates the Hinterlands (or alternately: No One Cares About Your Stupid Druffalo)

They stared at him with incredulity. "You do know that this is the Inquisition," Errol said slowly.

The farmer nodded.

"And that I'm the Herald of Andraste, the only one who can close the rifts that are literally tearing the world apart."

"Oh yes, my lady, and we're very thankful for your service."

"And yet… you want me to find and return this… druffalo."

"Ms. Fluffybottoms."

"Excuse me?"

"Her name is Ms. Fluffybottoms. She only responds to it." He looked at her expectantly. "I'd be so grateful if you could return her to me."

Errol pursed her lips. "Give me just one minute," she said, and stepped away, dragging Cassandra with her. "Cass, tell me I'm not crazy, this is ridiculous, right? Why do people keep asking us to run errands for them?"

Cassandra rubbed her temples. "Yes, it is ridiculous, but we are still a fledgling agency. Word of mouth and acts of kindness are necessary to build our power base. If that means finding a farmer's druffalo—"

"Ms. Fluffybottoms."

"—Ms. Fluffybottoms, then so be it."

"There's a rift less than half a mile away. My hand is almost dragging me there. I have shit to do. We have recruits and scouts, right? I've barely seen them since we left Haven. Let's use them. I'm not going to not close a rift to find Ms. Fluffybottoms."

"Keep saying Ms. Fluffybottoms," Varric said. "I like it."

"They've been scouting ahead. They're busy."

"Well unbusy them."

Cassandra looked at her hard for a minute, then nodded. "As the Herald requests." She walked off to a small grove of trees, presumably to speak with one of the scouts that always shadowed them from a discreet distance.

Errol turned to the farmer and gave him a huge fake smile and a double thumbs up. "We'll take care of it!" she chirped, before turning around and muttering under her breath, "asshole."

"Remind me who we're taking care of again," Varric asked, ambling by her side.

"I believe it was one Ms. Fluffybottoms," Solas said from her other side. Errol scowled at them.

"You're both just happy we don't have to do this one ourselves. I mean, come on, you thought having to find some broad's lost wedding ring in the middle of a war was just as silly as I did."

"Sentimental value can't be—" Solas started piously.

"Nah, she's right, it was dumb," Varric interrupted.

Cassandra returned. "It is done."

"One big hurrah for the future safe return of Ms. Fluffybottoms," Varric said jovially. "And what an epic tale it was. The Inquisition is surely a power to make men tremble."

"Oh, shut up," Cassandra snapped testily, but Errol was already laughing.

It had been a surprisingly quiet three weeks on the road. It was clear that there was a war going on, but they seemed to be traveling in its wake. They came across plenty of rifts and empty, burning buildings, and refugees, but no mages or templars. Still, the civilians seemed very happy to see the Inquisition, often thanking them profusely. Errol knew that they had soldiers scattered across the land, holding certain territories and keeping the people safe, so perhaps they were stronger than she or Cassandra thought.

They had already met with Mother Giselle and were now looking for a Grey Warden by the name of Blackwall. Leliana had taught her about the Grey Wardens, and the spymaster clearly felt very strongly about the role they played during the feared blights. The fact that Leliana was scared now that they had vanished - that anything could scare Leliana - made it worth it for Errol to find the last remaining Warden.

She was dwelling on this when the rebel mages attacked.

Errol didn't realize they weren't demons at first. She simply felt magic being used against her, magic with the intent to kill, and her defenses sprang up and fire flooded her hands and ran into her staff until it was fully lit. She fired it off, one two three, as the rest of them sprang into battle, and it wasn't until she smelled cooking meat that her brain began to process that something was wrong.

She stilled, and her barrier faltered. A lightning spell cracked into her side and whipped up her face, knocking her down and leaving her skin flayed. Someone was above her, and for a moment she didn't move, the smell…

"Fight back!" Solas screamed, as close to frightened as she had ever heard him, and without thinking she filled her hand with flames and shot them straight into the attacker's face.

The man - and it was a man, she was sure now - went down with a scream, and it was over.

Errol stood quickly, her head spinning, and stumbled away before any of them could make their way over to her. She rounded the corner of a broken down house and started to vomit. She was still downwind of that cooked-meat smell, and what horrified her was that it smelled like her mother's cooking, it smelled good.

She retched a few more times.

"You've gotta stop puking all the time, Sunshine," Varric said when she finally stopped, her legs wobbly from the stress. "It's really not a great reaction to have on the field." There was thinly-veiled concern in his words.

"I… I just killed someone," she said, wiping her mouth with the sleeve of her coat. She turned back to them, her eyes puffy and red.

"Three someones, actually," Cassandra said, crouching and rifling through the pockets of the dead with practiced ease.

Errol leaned against the wall. It was difficult to stay standing. She closed her eyes; she couldn't look at the bodies. "I killed people," she murmured, trying to wrap her head around it.

Suddenly she felt something cool against her skin. Errol cracked her eyes open to see Solas smearing some kind of white paste across her flayed cheek. He stood a careful distance from her, only the tips of his fingers touching her skin. He was always like that in the outside world: wary, quiet, unreachable.

"You did what you had to do to stay alive," he said softly. Then, louder: "This was bound to happen eventually."

Cassandra stood and approached them. "And all because we had to divert our scouts over a foolish request to find a druffalo."

Errol stared at them and no one met her eye. "What are you talking about?" Silence. "Am I talking to myself? Hello?"

"Eh, we should just get it over with," Varric said. He shifted on his feet, clearly uncomfortable. "Listen, why do you think it's been so quiet these past few weeks? We didn't want you getting all broken up about killing people. We knew you were worried about it, so we sent scouts ahead to, ah, take care of the problem before we arrived."

"How did you know…" Errol trailed off, and her jaw tightened. "Cullen."

"Now Sunshine, don't go hating on Curly, he just wanted to protect you, we all do," Varric started, but she straightened and pushed past him.

"No, you just want to protect the Mark on my hand, and you don't think I'm strong enough to hold my own so you decided to lie to and baby me in the middle of a war," she snapped, furious. "How many of your scouts died protecting my feelings? Anything else you've been lying to me about? If there is, feel free to tell me all about it on the way to finding Blackwall."

She spun on her heel and marched away, past the bodies and the smell of vomit and meat.

It was damp and chilly that night. Errol huddled near the fire, shivering, her arms around her knees, and stared into the flames.

Suddenly a cloak dropped around her shoulders. "Here," a deep voice said, and she turned to find a bowl of broth being put into her hands. "You didn't eat anything at supper."

"I'm not…"

"I know what happened. You have to eat."

Errol said nothing, just turned back to the fire. After a moment, she reluctantly lifted the lukewarm bowl to her mouth.

"Good," Blackwall said, and she watched out of the corner of her eye as he sat on a stone a few yards away and started honing his sword, the sound a soft swshhhh in the wet night. They had found him late in the afternoon, and after a brief skirmish with bandits, none of whom Errol had to kill (but you did kill today, you burned them alive, a voice whispered nastily inside of her), he had joined the Inquisition readily. He was broad and rough from years of training and living on his own, his face nearly obscured by a thicket of black hair and a wild beard. His rolling accent was comforting somehow, and there was a thoughtfulness to his steady voice. He reminded Errol of some of her family back in Scotland. She liked him almost immediately.

They were quiet for a while as she slurped her soup. The rest of the team had already gone to bed. They'd avoided her that day, with good reason - she had been surly and responded to any attempts at conversation with grunts or one-word responses. The pressure inside of her chest was a hand, squeezing so tightly she could barely breathe, barely keep moving without breaking down. You killed people today. Did they have families? Lovers? Is someone waiting for them at home? Is someone crying over them now? They were mages, like you. What if you could have talked them down, spoken to them first? What if—

"I thought," Blackwall finally said, as if reading her mind, "from what I've heard about the Inquisition, that you'd be used to killing by now."

Errol continued to stare at the fire, willing it to warm her bones. "Demons, yeah. Closing rifts. Not humans." She was silent for a moment, wondering how much to reveal. He was one of them now. What was the use of secrets? "My friends… they've kept that from me. Roamed ahead and taken care of the bandits before I could get there. I guess they thought they were doing me a favor, but who knows how many scouts and soldiers were killed because of my fragile ego?" She shook her head. "I've got blood on my hands now."

"You'll have a lot more on your hands before this is done, my lady," Blackwall said gravely.

"Does it ever get any easier?"

He shook his head, inspected his sword, continued whetting it. "No. But you learn to live with it. In a way. At least you learn to stop puking your guts up."

Errol groaned. "You heard?"

"I think everyone in the Hinterlands heard that retching." A beat. "Varric told me. Right when he told me not to fuck with you."

Errol was surprised. "Varric said that?"

"Said you weren't as tough as you look, but still the hero of the story. I take it he's a writer. I think I've even read one of his books. The detective one. Wasn't very good."

"Don't let him hear you say that."

There was a cranky yell from Varric and Solas' tent: "Too late!"

Errol couldn't help herself: she giggled. Blackwall smiled.

"Good to see some emotion on your face. Here I was starting to worry the famed Herald of Andraste was secretly a tranquil." He stood and sheathed his sword; Errol looked up at him, the warrior in the darkness, standing just outside of the firelight. "I saw you fight today. You took care not to kill anyone, and you saved a boy's life. I liked what I saw of the Inquisition, of you. That's why I joined. But sometimes you have to kill, and when that time comes, you have to be willing to do what needs to be done."

"It's not fair."

"No, it's not. But that's the way of it." He nodded at her. "Goodnight, my lady. Try to get some sleep."

Her mother is kneeling in front of her; they are both kneeling, and there is a spinning circle between them, and her mother's hands, wet and heavy with clay, are over her own small fingers.

"Careful now," her mother is saying, but it's spinning so fast. "Don't let it get away from you."

Errol wants to make a vase, graceful and tall like her mom can, but it's fat and lumpy even with her mom's hands guiding her.

"Smoothly," her mother croons. "Gentle, gentle."

She sticks her tongue out, concentrating.

"There," her mother says as the clay starts to even out, starts to become something beautiful. "See what you can do when you're as light as a butterfly?"

—wings beating ceaselessly against a cage—

—blood on the ground, burned smell in the air—

Errol looks up. "Mama?"

Her mother doesn't take her hands from Errols'; the clay is spinning faster and faster, breaking down, and it's starting to turn red. She points with her chin and Errol looks up to see the huge, fragile wings blooming from her own back, hovering above her, and at the bottom of them there is a dark swirl that looks like an owl's eye.

"They're only strong as long as you know who you are," her mother says serenely.

"What do you mean?" Errol asks, but there's no more whirring clay. Her hands are wet and warm and her mother's hands still cover hers but her fingers are clenched tight around the knife that protrudes from her mother's abdomen. Errol starts to scream as the blood gushes, too much blood, flooding all over the floor, sticky on her arms and body.

Her mother presses a bloody palm to Errol's chest. "Oh my baby girl, it'll be okay." She brings that hand around to clasp the back of Errol's neck, leaving a trail of hot red liquid, and leans in to whisper in her ear, oblivious to the knife in her stomach. "They will change you, if they can. They will grasp at the very heart of you. Don't let them."

There's someone on either side of her now, familiar but she can't see their faces, and as one they each reach out to touch and her beautiful, beautiful wings crumble into a mess of scales and dust and blood and she's choking on it, choking on the blood and the meat smell and she can't breathe—

"Errol!"

Someone grabs her by the arms and pulls her into their chest, and she feels herself yanked away from the scene forcefully, as if it doesn't want to give her up. Suddenly she is in a glade by a stream, and the blood is gone and she's an adult again, and she is curled in Solas' lap with her head tucked under his chin.

"A nightmare," he breathes, pulling her closer to him. "It was a nightmare. You're safe now."

Errol can't help herself. She fists her hands in his tunic and starts to cry.

He lets her cry for a long time. He even strokes her hair, murmuring things in elven that she doesn't understand. His magic feels protective and safe and lacks that certain sharper aura that she often senses from him while in dreams, the one that warns her that there's something of an act to his daytime mild-mannered elf Hedge-mage image.

Luckily they're in the Fade so when she's finished his tunic is as clean as when she started. She pulls away, suddenly embarrassed by her outburst, but as if reading her mind he uses two fingers to turn her chin toward him and shakes his head.

"Don't be. You needed to cry. Better here than in front of everyone at camp."

She musters a smile, very aware that he is still touching her face. "Thanks."

He holds his fingers there a moment more before letting her go. "You are welcome."

Errol stands and stretches, feeling how long her body is, how close the sky feels. Here in the Fade, she could probably bring the sky down to her if she wanted. But I can't keep myself from being a damn elf all the time, she thinks, standing on her toes. Part of her likes it, the part that always felt too bulky and square and hairy, that shaved and waxed and looked longingly at models in magazines. The other part of her rebels, feels wrong in this fake skin, feels even more wrong because it doesn't feel wrong, it feels like another aspect of her, a new skin, like trying on a new dress, and it's distressing how easy it is to leave her old skin behind.

When she is done stretching and stressing she turns to him to find him, as always, watching her. He doesn't watch her like this in the real world: thoughtfully, a bit calculating, like she is a puzzle he is trying to piece together. In the real world he barely looks at her at all, walks a respectful distance away, doesn't touch her unless it's necessary. Here he trades barbs to (she thinks) see her smile and he touches her freely: a hand on her elbow, a strand of hair tucked behind her ear.

There is still something missing, something critical that she doesn't understand, that she is so close to understanding, and it makes her wary of him.

"Come with me," he says, and holds out his hand, and even though she is wary she takes it, because there is more than wariness in her feelings toward him, she's just not sure what yet.

The scene changes, and now they are standing outside of a small cottage. Everything is hazy and translucent, like watching ghosts, but Errol thinks she recognizes one of the villages they passed through earlier, except in real life it was abandoned, the homes aflame.

"Please," a woman is begging. She is standing in the doorway, her body a shield, and there is a little girl holding onto the edge of her bedraggled dress and peering out from behind her. "We can't leave our home, the men were killed and the templars have already taken everything we have, these four walls are our only protection, we won't survive out in the woods."

"You have nothing?" the man in front of her asks, and he smiles, a brutal, animal smile and lifts his staff. "You gave what you had to the templars. The least you could give to me is the blood in your veins."

The woman screams. Errol lunges forward as if she can stop him, but she passes through them and the images go up in smoke and are gone, and they are back in the glade again with nothing but the summer wind and the faint sound of crickets.

"That was one of the mages you killed today," Solas says from behind her. Her arms are still out, still grasping empty air, as if she can save the woman and her child. "I know you find it difficult to have your hands stained with the blood of another, but I thought that you should know that these are the men you shed tears over. If you want justice, this is what I can offer. If you wish for easy answers there are none. That is the way of the world."

Slowly she lowers her arms. Blackwall had said something similar. That's the way of it. "It shouldn't be."

"You're right," Solas says, surprising her, and she turns to him. There's a contemplative look on his face. "But it is, for now. Perhaps it won't be forever."

She's about to ask him what he means when she feels spirit arms wrap around her from behind and the impression of an unseen mouth near her ear.

Come, quickly, before you wake, the hurt isn't healed yet, the young man's voice whispers. Solas' eyes widen, and he reaches for her but then there's a yank backward and—

She's human again, back in her own clothes and not the flowing robes she always wears with Solas, her feet in shoes, and she's at Haven in the war room. She knows, without understanding how, that it is the night before she left for the Hinterlands.

"I'm telling you we can't expend the resources!" Cassandra is saying hotly.

"Do you remember your first kill, Cassandra?" Cullen asks. "The first time you put your blade through someone's throat and watched the light fade from their eyes?"

"I was trained—" Cassandra starts.

"Yes, trained, like I was, from a young age, but it still hit you like a punch in the gut the first few times, didn't it? Maybe it still does. Now that girl, that woman, may be marked by Andraste or whatever that thing on her hand is but she is a civilian who has likely never imagined she'd be murdering people before breakfast. We don't know how it will affect her and she is our only chance at closing the Breach."

"You're very passionate about this subject, Cullen," Leliana says from her perch in the corner. "If I didn't know you any better I'd say you were letting your personal feelings become involved in your judgement."

Cullen runs an agitated hand through his hair. "I—no! I merely—"

"However, I agree with your assessment," Leliana says, surprising everyone. "I was once as she is — possessed of a certain innocence. I lost it a long time ago. She will lose hers too, and quickly. But as the Herald and the one with the Mark it would not do to have her breaking down in the field. We can spare a few scouts and soldiers to help clear a path."

"I agree with Nightingale," Varric says, and Cassandra swings on him.

"Who even invited you to this meeting?" she snaps.

"I'm going along too, aren't I? I figured we were all invited. It's not my fault Solas is off doing elf stuff. Plus, you get to know a person in a month. Errol's a good kid. Her world's not like ours. For all her bluster, she's soft underneath. And if there's a way to keep her from having to kill people for a little while longer, well, I'll take it."

"And put more lives in harms way?" Cassandra asks.

"They work for the Inquisition," Leliana says. "And they're my scouts. They know what they're getting into."

"I don't want her killing anyone," Cassandra says, sighing. "Obviously. But she won't be happy knowing others were endangered for her peace of mind. We could come to regret this decision."

"So we make sure she doesn't find out," Varric says jovially, slapping Cassandra on the shoulder. She pushes him away and stalks off. Varric looks at Cullen and Leliana. "Was it something I said?"

The scene wavers and fades. Errol tries to hold on to the vision of Cullen's figure, slumped shoulders and all, for as long as she can before he too dissolves into mist and she can see nothing but grey.

They did it because they care.

Errol can almost see the spirit in the corner of her eye, but every time she turns he's just out of sight.

You need them as much as they need you. There are expectations but also love, or the beginnings of love, like a family tied together by death and hope and death again. You are more than your marked hand.

"Who are you? Where are you? What are you?" she asks, frustrated, spinning in fruitless circles.

A friend. Here. Not a demon.

"If you're my friend, let me see you."

If they touch your wings they will crumble, the scales so delicate, the fierce Owl's eye only an illusion. No, not yet! Not ready yet. What if you're scared? I'd have to make you forget. All of this undone, fine as sand in a sieve. No. No! I'll wait until you're close to waking. Then you won't be scared of me. Then you won't forget.

"Tell me your name, at least."

Names have power, here.

"Please."

Promise not to tell.

"I promise."