The village square was nearly deserted - not surprising for the rain - but it was surprising that Shianni was not in the flat they had once shared, nor was she at the ramshackle shed Faean the distiller had set up as a makeshift neighborhood pub. She did leave Zevran there, though. Perhaps part of it was the moonshine, but also because the girl tending bar - some cousin of Drystan Kovalis - was quite pretty and tended to wear her kirtles cut low and bodice laced tight.
She began to worry a little when she found her father's shop vacant and locked, then a bit more when her uncle was not at his shop, his forge cold and black, meaning that he had not stepped out momentarily - he had been gone all day. As a last-ditch effort, she went over to Soris's flat, though the last time she had checked, he intended to return to working outside the alienage, preferably at a warehouse on the docks where he could keep an ear on the outside world. As she made it into the half-covered courtyard of Soris's building, she was simultaneously relieved and then even more perturbed to find the entire extended family there. Cyrion, Cedrin, Morran, and the two other Tabris boys who'd stayed in Denerim clustered under the eaves, murmuring among themselves. Soris himself was there too, in another corner, tossing a rubber ball with two human boys, all of them somehow looking both bored and incredibly nervous at the same time.
"Oh shit," she said sharply, realizing what was going on.
"Ah! I see someone's ears were burning," Cyrion remarked, recognizing the voice and the profanity, "You do have remarkable timing, my girl. How long have you been in town?"
"About four hours. How's she doing?" Ten asked.
"Well, we wouldn't know, would we," Morran said, "Not men's business as you folk always say."
"Go on," Soris said, completely nonplussed with her presence. He tossed the ball to the smaller boy and waved her upstairs, "Shianni's in there with the women, though I feel a little better you can look over her shoulder."
Ten climbed the courtyard stairs and opened the back door to the flat. Two women huddled over the stove—Morran's wife, Aislinda, and Shianni herself—looked up sharply, then relaxed as they saw who it was. Ten took off her cloak, shaking it outside the door to remove the worst of the rain, and hung it on a hook, shutting the wind and rain out behind her.
"I have to say that is a dead-on impression of a drowned rat," Shianni said flippantly, though there was an undertone of nervousness.
"Why, Shianni, you're sober! Must be an important occasion," Ten replied, "Though one of Cedrin's brood spawning isn't exactly a rare one."
They both chuckled and embraced, but then Shianni sighed and absently wiped her hands on her apron, "It's been nearly a full day and night."
"But this is her third child," Ten said.
"That is why we make a worry," Aislinda added. Aislinda was a thickset woman, for an elf anyway, with light brown hair usually tucked under a bonnet but never staying put, giving her a frizzy halo at all times. She spoke a stilted Nevarran accent and cadence. She knew all the right words but could never remember which went in which order, no matter how many times someone corrected her, but it never kept her from being understood, and so Ten had always found it charming, "Here. Clean towels take them."
She thrust an armload at Ten, and she took them into the back hall. Open doors to the front room showed that what had been a sitting room now boasted bunkbeds and an array of toys, and a large closet with a small window had been cleared out for a cradle - Cyrion's work from the look of it. Closer to the closed door of the last bedroom, she heard the familiar soothing voice of her aunt Lydeia and the also familiar groans of a laboring woman. She opened the door slowly. Maylin was being walked around the room, supported by Lydeia on one side and Endania the midwife on the other. Endania's apprentice, a hollow-cheeked girl of sixteen, stood awkwardly in the corner while two other women of the Alienage - Ten could not remember their names but knew that both of them had had in excess of ten children each - were bustling about, changing sheets, setting herbs to boil, and gossiping quietly. Ten dropped the towels on a stool by the door and made to leave again, but the midwife spotted her. She shouted to one of the older women, who came to take her place by Maylin's side. She then walked right up to Ten, grabbed her by the elbow with one sweaty hand, and steered her into the hallway, shutting the door behind her.
"Teneira, I don't know what twist of fate has brought you here, but the Maker must be involved somehow," the midwife said, "I'm going to have to cut her." Ah shit, of course, that's what the towels were for.
"You don't need me to close her up. Your apprentice is right there," Ten said.
"Yasilda is young, she's only done it once and the mother died. She probably would have anyway, but she hasn't gotten over it."
"What about Shianni?"
"Your cousin means well, but…" Endania said, "She hasn't touch a drop of the liquor in two weeks and I'm worried the shakes will come back if she's under too much pressure."
"Really. Two weeks," Ten said, filing that away for later.
"Look," the midwife said, "It's bad enough that we have a human woman in here. Some men from the Chantry came a week ago and tried to take her and her boys with them. She threw such a fit that they left. But if she dies in Alienage, in the care of an elfin midwife, giving birth to the child of an elfin man, attended by her elfin in-laws? Me, your cousin, and probably a few of your other family members will find a noose around our necks one way or another."
"Shit," Ten muttered. It was true. Even if she stormed over to the palace at that very instant, demanded an audience with the queen, and protection was promised, there was precious little the city guard and even the whole of the crown's fighting men could do to stop a determined lynch mob. "All right. I know the routine."
"Go wash your hands."
Ten nodded and went back into the kitchen. She murmured the midwife's verdict to her cousin and cousin-in-law, both of whom shook their heads. Shianni opened her case of potions and began setting out the necessary concoctions. Sedative. Paralytic. Relaxant. Antiseptic. She also took out a tool Ten had not seen before.
"What's that?" she asked.
Shianni held it up proudly. It was a small pot, affixed to an oil burner, with a lid on it. The lid had a hole in it, and a length of tin tubing came out of that hole, leading to a what looked like half a sheep's bladder stuck on the end of it with pitch.
"You know how hard it is to get them to swallow once the cutting starts," Shianni said.
"But… how…"
"You boil your anesthetics," Shianni said triumphantly, "We put the cocktail in, light the burner. Then the steam goes through the tube, and you get the bladder over her nose and mouth, she breathes in the steam and she stays out of it. And, more importantly, still."
"Have you tried it before?"
"They had to take Hanrian Valis's leg last month, it kept him sleepy the whole time."
"You made this?"
"What, you think you're the only one with crazy ideas? I designed it, Cedrin did the pot and burner, I got the tin tubing off a peddler who definitely didn't steal it from a construction site."
"Well shit," Ten said, "You're the town alchemist now. You do what you think is best."
The three of them stood around a basin, each scrubbing their hands and arms up to the elbow in turn, and in turn, all three went to the back. Maylin had been moved to the bed. Lydeia was leaning over her, murmuring softly, but Maylin was agitated, shaking her head wildly. She saw Ten, Shianni, and Aislinda walk in, and her eyes went wide and wild. "No," she insisted, her voice going guttural, "No, absolutely not. I have two boys. They already lost their father… they have nobody."
"If we don't you are both going to die. Do you understand that?" Lydeia asked, kindly but firmly, "And we are not going to let that happen."
"You're saying that, but I know…," Maylin insisted, "I know what happens to the mother when the knives come out… don't fucking lie to me. They did my ma like that, let her bleed out all so my wee brother could…"
"You will not be left to bleed out," Lydeia said, "I don't know who attended your ma, but that's not how we do things here."
Aislinda was watching the scene with stern impatience as Maylin's voice went high and hysterical. She walked up and put a hand on her mother-in-law's shoulder. Lydeia backed off and let Aislinda approach the patient. Ten watched curiously as she unlaced her bodice and lifted her skirts and kirtle, exposing herself to the waist. She took Maylin's hand and placed it on the scar that ran lengthwise from her navel to her pubic bone, well-healed and inconspicuous a year and a half after her own son had been taken out of it, but definitely there.
"The same lady has me cut," she said, nodding at Endania, "The other lady has me stitched," she nodded at Ten, "I live. My baby also. You yesterday have him held."
Inspired, one of the neighbor women, who was in her forties, unbuttoned her own shirt and pulled her skirt down, exposing a similar scar, "My ninth," she said, "He lived. And I had two more. The regular way."
Maylin looked from her sister-in-law to the neighbor woman, then winced as another contraction hit. "All right," Maylin said, "Don't… don't hold me down too hard, though. Please."
"What are the humans doing to their women?" Ten wondered softly in Shianni's ear as they rummaged through bottles. She understood field surgery. Sometimes a limb had to go when a limb had to go, and there was no time for drugging the patient up, but a birth at home surrounded by family and an experienced midwife? Barbaric.
Ten watched as Shianni set out the vials, explaining what each one of them did, where it came from, how she had brewed it. Maylin, who must have been in excruciating pain, listened closely, the fact that someone was actually giving her information as soothing as anything else. Ten stood back, hearing a note of confidence and self-assuredness in her cousin's voice she hadn't heard before. Maker's breath, the minute I go, she's out here inventing new methods for anesthetizing patients and sounding like a veteran physician. And apparently not drinking every night. Was I the problem?
"Take them in the order I laid them out," Shianni continued softly, "It'll take a few minutes to kick in. So take this one first, all of it, and you're going to sing your favorite song. I'll tell you when it's time for the next one."
There was a pause between them. Ten could see the moment when Maylin had decided to trust them. She unstoppered the bottle and drank down the sedative inside. Then, a little self-consciously, she started singing a children's song Ten had heard before about a farmer with two yellow goats who had no milk pail and so had to run around town trying to sell goat's milk from his hat. The other women joined in after the second line, but once they got to the second verse, Maylin's voice started fading. Shianni handed her the second vial.
"Thank you," she said, complacently, taking it down. Then she kept going where she had left off, the farmer lamenting the goat's milk that had leaked through the crown of his hat. The words then began to garble together, and Shianni unstoppered the last vial and held it to Maylin's lips. Maylin drank obediently, then sank limply down into the pillow, her eyes closing. They waited a moment, and then the room sprang into action. Endania held out her arms. Her apprentice Yasilda doused them in moonshine while Ten and Shianni got the limp Maylin out of her shirt and did the same to her abdomen. The neighbor women had taken the blades out of the fire while the song was going on, Maylin too distracted to see them and panic again.
Ten looked away for the grisly bits. There was a reason she had always stuck to potions. It was probably strange, she thought, that she was squeamish about some things, given the number of people she'd killed, the viscera she'd seen plopped here and there, the limbs severed and flying about… well, it was one thing when she was in the heat of battle and the loss of an arm or an arrow through the eye would be followed quickly by oblivion. It was another when the cutting was done with the intent that the recipient survive, and thus feel the pain of it.
She was brought to her senses by the telltale cry that had all of the women in the room breathing a sigh of half-relief that at least part of their job was done. At the sound, Maylin's eyes fluttered open and she started trying to move, reaching out wildly, causing blood to spurt in an arc across the room, splattering both Ten and Shianni. Lydeia, who had been holding the cause of all the trouble, rushed up and placed the tiny infant on her mother's breast. Shianni ran back to her other side, lighting the burner under her little pot, and putting the sheep's bladder mask over her nose and mouth. Maylin's dark eyes looked confused for a moment but soon closed again. Lydeia stood there, holding the baby against its mother's breast so it could not fall even as Maylin drifted off to nowhere again. Endania and Yasilda moved in, applying pressure to the wound, while Ten went in with needle and thread, stitching together layers of skin and muscle, every so often holding her hands out for one of the other women to wipe down with antiseptic when they became too slippery. When the wound was closed, Shianni and Endania had a short discussion on whether it was better to let it breathe for a while, but concluded that it should be dressed immediately. They then packed it with a paste of various herbs that sped up healing, and then four of them wound a bandage tightly around her.
"There," Aislinda said with satisfaction, having pinned it in place, "That will in her guts hold."
They let Maylin sleep, breathing in the combination of sedatives and paralytics while cleaning up so she would not be horrified to awaken in a pool of her own blood and other various bodily substances. The floor and walls got scrubbed of what had fallen or squirted on them, and the rest of the house got a good scrub as well. Once they were satisfied with their work, Shianni packed up her little contraption. Maylin stayed out for another ten minutes or so, but eventually, her eyes opened again, and she looked up at the women surrounding her, then down at the child on her breast.
"Well, she looks like her father," Lydeia said, "Poor thing. But she's breathing. And so are you."
Maylin didn't even hear the joke, just stared at the child as though she could not believe she was there. Ten watched her count fingers and toes a dozen times, run her fingertips over back and buttocks, nose and mouth, and - Ten could not help but peek - decidedly pointed ears.
"It's a girl?" Maylin said, her eyes still a little bit unfocused from the drugs, "I have my girl?"
"Aye, it's a girl," Lydeia said, "You have your girl, and I'm a bit jealous over that, I am. Aislinda, go fetch Soris and the boys. Everyone else, out!"
The women obeyed, Shianni packing up her things, Endania collecting her fee with some clucking about how Lydeia and her offspring were responsible for keeping her in business all these years. Back out in the rain, Ten helped Shianni carry the heavy case of vials back to the flat they'd shared. To her surprise, lamps inside were lit and there was a fire in the hearth. A pot of something was simmering over the stove.
"Oh!" Shianni exclaimed, realizing this was probably a surprise, "I didn't have time to tell you."
"Did you and the stable boy shack up or something?"
"No," she said and was about the continue her explanation when the door to the back bedroom opened.
"Soup's on the hob! Should be done in ten minutes or so!" called a familiar voice with a familiar not-quite-Highever accent. The voice was followed by the girl it belonged to, who stopped when she saw Ten, then waved, "Ah! It's you!"
"Well, Miss Cawdrey, I see my advice about running the roads in the middle of a war went unheeded," Ten said sternly. She took Shianni by the elbow and guided her into the corner, "Are we in the business of taking on every fatherless shem in Ferelden now? Between Soris's stepkids and this one…"
"Ten, look at her. She's fourteen and looks seven. She's skin and bones," Shianni said, removing her elbow from her cousin's grasp, "Nobody was taking care of her. And she's… family. In a horrible fucked up way, but that isn't her fault."
Ten shook her head and looked over at Sybil Cawdrey. She did have some color in her cheeks that hadn't been there the day she'd snuck up on her outside the village of Lowstrand. She was wearing clothes that fit, though she was still dressed like a boy, and Ten imagined that might have been preference as much as necessity. From the smell, she both knew how to cook and clean up after cats. And… Ten knew full well that if she had still been living there and the girl had shown up on her doorstep, she would not have turned her away.
"Well, I suppose you don't need my approval anyway," Ten concluded, "How long has she been here?"
"Two weeks."
"Does her ma know where she is?"
"I made her write a letter."
"And if they come in here looking to lynch the elfin witch who kidnapped the human child?"
"Ten, nobody even bothered to make sure she bathed and ate, you think they're going to come halfway across the country to find her?"
"Can I ask why you fine ladies are covered in blood?" Sybil asked. She had gone up to the stove and was stirring what was on top of it, "I thought you said someone was having baby. You look like you've been in battle."
Ten and Shianni looked at each other.
"I see nobody has explained some pretty basic facts of life to you," Ten said gruffly, "But… that's not my job. In fact, I think I've had about enough of the facts of life today. So I will be taking my leave."
"And none could blame you," Shianni said.
"I'm staying over at the Paloma. Probably be here another week or so."
"Then off gallivanting across the countryside again?"
"Someone's got to do it."
After having gotten most of the way to the gate, Ten suddenly remembered that she had gone there with Zevran, who, despite insistences to the contrary, definitely did not know how to behave himself. She didn't find him in the 'pub' but did find a handful of her cousins, including Morran, smoking decent Antivan cigars and getting shitcanned. Healthy babies were a good excuse to drink. Even the half-bred ones, a fact which she was impressed nobody had pointed out except for the midwife. She accepted a dram and a smoke but made some excuse about being on her way before she got too tiddly. It was only a ten-minute walk back to the inn, where Missus Bantree had taken up residence behind the bar. She waved one large hand at Ten, who waved back and made to go up to her room and change out of her blood-soaked frock, but was then distracted by a gruff dwarven voice calling her name.
"I told you she'd be back soon," Oghren slurred merrily from a table in the corner once he'd gotten her attention. He and Alistair were seated there, a bottle of whiskey between them. Strangely Sten was sitting there with them. He did not have a glass in front of him but appeared fascinated at the general nonsense that went on in a working-class dive bar on a weeknight.
"You are covered in blood," Sten observed, "It does not smell like yours, though. Nor…" he took a sniff, his nostrils flaring, "Is it the blood of death."
"I have no idea how you can smell that under the moonshine and cigar smoke," Oghren declared, "Come on, Ten, sit your ass down. We're having a grand old time. Why did none of you tell me how many types of whiskey you have up here?"
"And let me guess, you're about to try all of them," Ten said, sliding onto the bench beside Alistair, trying to gauge how drunk he was, "Where are the dodgy foreigners?"
"No idea," Alistair said. His speech was slow but not yet slurred, "You haven't told us why you're covered in blood this time."
"Women's business," Ten said.
"Women's business that has you bloody, tipsy, and smelling like cigars?"
Oghren knit his brows, then raised them, his eyes widening in realization, "Boy or girl?"
"Girl," said Ten. She had to give the dwarf some credit, "Cousin's kid. She made a hell of a mess on her way here, but everyone made it out alive."
"Well shit, congratulations! I'll drink to that, Aunty!" Oghren declared.
"It's like the sixteenth one, I'm not that excited," Ten said but poured herself a glass.
"Wait, wait…" Alistair started, "What does that have to do with the blood?"
"What have I said about asking about women's business?" Ten warned.
"It's just an awful lot of blood."
"Yes. Being born is a dangerous proposition. It's wonder any of us are here," Ten said, "Except Sten. Don't you lot hatch from eggs?"
Sten looked at her with an expression that said he wasn't sure if she was joking or not. Ten had been joking, but now she actually wondered.
"I actually do not know," the qunari concluded, "Our females keep their business much more secret than yours do."
"Or your men are just less nosy," Ten said. She took another drink and let herself relax, allowing the noise of the bar and banter of her companions to fade into the background. Something about her latest visit home had left her unsettled. More than some shem urchin from a shore town staying in her room, more than Soris having a baby. It was like she was no longer a part of the fabric of the place. The two cousins that had depended on her most now had other things to worry about. Shianni, whom she had worried most about, had seemingly only gotten her shit together once Ten was gone. Soris, as Morran had, would have gone somewhat straight once he had a kid to worry about. Her dad had plenty of grandnieces to nitpick, especially now that the oldest were becoming teenagers themselves. The place could and would move on without her. It was comforting in some ways, but also left her feeling cold.
"Hey, no fair going away from us when you've just come back," Alistair said, getting an arm around her and pulling her back to the moment.
"Sorry. What were we talking about?"
"Tactics," Sten said, "We are playing a war game where we predict the outcome of a hypothetical battle based on various factors. It is very instructive. Useful for sharpening the mind of a warrior."
"What battle?"
"Who would win in a fight - a fully trained, fully armored Orlesian chevalier with a glaive and shortsword… or five thousand chickens?" Oghren asked.
"Are the chickens organized?"
Oghren looked at Alistair.
"No, just regular chickens," Alistair said.
"Regular chickens come in various sizes, are we talking Frostback crested or Ghislainais longspur?" Ten asked.
"Let's call it an even split," Alistair said.
"All right, well the Ghislainais always win at the cockfights, so I'll give them an edge," Ten said.
"Well I didn't say gamecocks, I said chickens," Alistair protested.
"Gamecocks are chickens! What the fuck other type of chicken would try to throw hands with a chevalier?"
"Oghren, who's right here?"
"I didn't even know what a chicken was two months ago," the dwarf said, "So I am not the one to settle this argument."
After a good half hour of debate, they'd settled on the chickens, with a normal flock's ratio of hens to roosters, equally spread out among the five most popular breeds of chicken, winning against one, but not two chevaliers unless their armor was in shoddy condition. At that point they all decided to call it a night, and Ten knew that it didn't really matter. She had moved on as well. There was no going back, even if she won this fight. And she probably wouldn't, not long-term. There was no point in wishing for the life she had had. So she went to bed in the arms of a man whose very presence would have put her in fear for her life this time last year and quietly made her peace with it.