The Dalish version of elfin moonshine, which was the slot Ten had decided the strange thick liquor would occupy in her mind, turned out to be a mistake. Well, for Lelianna and Oghren, anyway, both of whom were found the following day passed out near the ashes of the fire and neither of whom would be moved for love, money, or magic.
"The dwarf I'm not surprised about," Wynne fussed as Sten, with a roll of the eyes, got Oghren under both armpits and dragged him into his tent, "But Lelianna! I thought Orlesians were more refined."
"Maybe she's actually from the dead-animal-as-a-hat part of the country," Morrigan mused.
"Our hosts brought us some… interesting libations," Zevran commented by way of an explanation, "It appears she has not the constitution for it." He had coaxed Lelianna to her feet. She mumbled something in Orlesian as her eyes fluttered open and closed, "That said, I have no idea how the three of us are standing. Nobody was in good form by the time we retired."
"Least of all the Dalish contingent," Alistair remarked, looking up the hill to where two of their previous night's companions were oiling a dozen or so hunting bows, chattering in Elvish and generally looking like nothing had touched them. "They were far worse than we were."
Ten had her suspicions, but she kept mum about them, "Anyone else have some fucked up dreams?" she asked generally of the company. Wynn and Morrigan looked at each other and shrugged.
"I do not understand this… 'dream,'" Sten said, having returned from depositing Oghren in an ignominious heap, "I thought that word meant 'aspiration.'"
"It can, but it also refers to what your mind does while you sleep," said Ten.
"When I sleep, my mind sleeps," Sten said.
Ten narrowed her eyes at him. As far as she knew, it was only dwarves who did not dream. The common wisdom was that dreaming was related to magic, that the same thing that tied mages to the Fade is what allowed even non-mages to walk in it while they slept. Ten knew that there were qunari mages - she had never met one. Still, some of the missionaries had used the relatively better position mages were in in qunari society as a selling point for potential elfin recruits. Therefore, it would make sense that qunaris could dream. Then again, she had never quite gotten a good enough explanation for why almost every human and elf could dream but not all of them could do magic, so perhaps with qunaris it was on a spectrum and Sten just happened to be at one end. She didn't comment further, and so Sten went on about his business.
"You too, huh?" Alistair said quietly after Zevran had dragged Lelianna out of earshot.
"It wasn't darkspawn-adjacent, though," Ten said, "Those don't even feel like dreams. This was definitely a dream, just with some… weird shit in the forest."
"Old man and a wolf?"
She looked up at him, "Was I talking in my sleep again?"
"No," he said, "I saw them… him…. It too."
"Really," she said, "There's definitely something off about this wood. I can't put my finger on it, it just feels like…"
"It doesn't feel real," Alistair said, "Like I wasn't even sure I'd woken up until you started thrashing around. The whole time we've been here, it's like waking, sleeping, there's no real difference."
"Sorry about the elbow in the face, by the way," she said, "I'm going to see if jumping into some cold water does the trick. You're right, it's as though I know intellectually I'm awake right now, but everything just seems off."
After finding an isolated bend of one of the brooks feeding the large lake to wash the cold sweat and booze smell from her skin, she returned to find Mithra, the archer who had greeted them with so much cordiality the previous afternoon, chatting lowly with Zevran.
"Oy!" called Mithra, laying eyes on Ten, "Grey Warden!"
Ten was decent, having a kirtle and dress on but not laced, but not what one would call 'clothed' anywhere in civilization. Then again they weren't really anywhere that could be called civilization, and so she did not protest, doing her laces up as she went. And, to be fair, most of the Dalish women seemed to have absolutely no problem prancing about in deerskin tops that ended below the ribcage and tight deerskin breeches which started several inches below that, so perhaps she should not have been concerned.
Evidently, Alistair, who had been amusing himself throwing a stick for the dog, had heard it as well and walked over, slimy stick in hand, Pigeon at his heels. He turned and made to throw it again.
"Not in the lake!" Ten protested, but it was too late, and it turned over and over in the air, drool gleaming in the sunlight, and splashed into the marshiest part of the water. She sighed inwardly, and took a few steps back before Pigeon took a flying leap. The ensuing splash was one for the ages, the lake's murky water raining down on the rest of the group.
"Well I was talking to her," Mithra sighed, gesturing at Ten with one hand and wiping her face with the other.
"You'd need to be more specific, then," Alistair replied drily. Ten rolled her eyes. At no point had it been clarified to any of the Dalish that they were, in fact, both Grey Wardens. He had, after all, been perfectly happy to have her look like she was entirely at fault the previous day when two arrows were pointed at each of them.
"Did you mean to do that?" Zevran asked, looking at Alistair like he had three heads, "I still cannot tell if you are this obnoxious on purpose or simply oblivious to the havoc you wreak."
Alistair, who had actually gotten the worst of it, just shrugged, and turned to Mithra, "What do you need us for?"
"Zathrian's out of his trance, he wants to speak with you," she said, "Both of you. I guess. He's not going to like you."
"He's used to that," Ten observed, "Zathrian put clothes on, I hope," Ten said. Then again she had no idea what counted as 'clothed' for Dalish men of his age. There was precious little gray hair in the camp, Mairali appearing to be one of the more senior members of the clan. And most of the men, even the handful that appeared to be over fifty, seemed to be perfectly comfortable, even in the slight chill of Spring, naked to the waist, or occasionally wearing vests that seemed to function more as decoration and storage than clothing.
"You can never tell with him. It's a risk we all take," Mithra said, "He's in the big tent in the center there. With the blue designs on the outside."
This was, evidently, an invitation to walk right through the camp, unescorted, which they did, drawing a few stares. This time, when someone shouted something - a male voice this time - Ten froze and stood upright. She shook her head a bit, and kept walking.
"What'd he say?" Alistair asked.
"Well he wasn't hitting on you if that's what you're asking," Ten said.
"What did he say?"
"I am pretty sure it was a slur."
"Well I thought the not-nice term for 'human' was 'shem' and he didn't say that."
"That's just the word, any not-nice connotations are context-specific and it's not our fault that the context frequently calls for not-niceness. Either way, that's not what he called you."
"You know full well I will be incredibly annoying about this until you tell me."
"Well… all right. So the halla, right? Their draft animals?" she gestured at the herd of yellow-white deer grazing on the greenery to the north along the lakeshore.
"Yes, with the antlers. We all know what halla are."
"So, halla sometimes interbreed with other types of deer, and when they do, they have offspring that's pretty much the equivalent of a mule."
"Where are you going with this?"
"That's what he shouted at you. Halianthri. Well, actually, there was a generic vulgar modifier before it so basically he just called you a fucking mule."
"I mean… it's not nice to be called that, but why it's certainly not bad enough you wouldn't want to repeat…. oh. " He paused and turned, meeting the eyes of the man who'd shouted, and flipped him off lazily. The guilty party, who had clearly just been trying to show off to his friends, looked surprised that he had been heard, let alone understood, and looked quickly back down to his work, which was rubbing a block of beeswax over a longbow.
"I told you," Ten said, "Just because I couldn't see it doesn't mean nobody else can."
They had, in the intervening, reached the appointed tent. They stood there, a little perplexed, not knowing the most polite way to indicate one had arrived when there was no door to be knocked upon. They needn't have worried.
"Enter!" a voice, neutral in accent but with the sonorous gravitas of a classically trained actor or orator.
First Ten, then Alistair, ducked under the tent flap. The conical tents were actually quite spacious on the inside. Half it was taken up with something like a tent within a tent, which Ten surmised was there to keep the weather off any occupants while letting the fire be exposed to the sky through the central hole. A single bedroll was laid beneath this on a worn but well cared-for leather rug at the bottom. The Keeper himself, bald-pated and robed - thank the Maker - sat beneath this subtent, crosslegged, one hand on each knee. Well, he doesn't look a thousand years old, Ten thought. Indeed, he didn't look a day over fifty. He was old by Dalish standards, but compared to Wynne, or even Eimaril, who was by all accounts younger than he was, he looked positively youthful.
"Ma serannas," Zathrian said, solemn but not unfriendly, dark eyes glancing over the both of them.
"Not a chance, you're not getting me like that again," Ten said.
To her surprise, he actually laughed ruefully and gestured for them to sit, which they did. "Mithra told me about the… brief misunderstanding the other day. You have to understand…"
"Oh I do," she said, "My own fault for trying to conduct business in a language I'm not fluent in."
"I'm impressed you speak it at all. I did not realize our urban cousins bothered with it," Zathrian said, "And, I confess, when they said the Grey Warden was an elf, it must be one of ours. I stand corrected."
"I am just as much of an elf as you are," Ten said, taking a bit of umbrage at the implication, "But in any case I'm actually not the last Grey Warden."
"Yes, I gathered that," Zathrian said, looking at Alistair with… was that approval? "Do not mistake me, we obviously have many of our more… settled kin in this very camp. That is why I was impressed. The tongue has fallen into disuse over the centuries, even among the Dalish."
"And you are trying to singlehandedly preserve it?" Ten asked, remembering what their guests had told her about linguistic politics in the camp the previous night.
"We all do what we can," Zathrian said, looking them over again, "I have to say, I am feeling a tiny bit vindicated that the gods have seen fit to put the nation's fate into three elfin hands. And don't look at me like that, boy, I have seen every permutation there is."
"Look, uncle, this should be a simple transaction," Ten said hurriedly before that topic of conversation could be explored further, "We have a treaty. Your clan is bound by it. And, as far as I can tell, you have the power to gather the others. I won't ask how, but suffice it to say, we have to call it due."
"Well, it would be simple," Zathrian said, stroking his chin with one long-fingered hand.
Ten sighed, rubbing her temples, feeling a few errant drops of water falling from her hair onto her neck, "There's a 'but' coming isn't there."
"Let me guess: Some unspeakable catastrophe prevents you from rallying the clans, and if we solve it, we can have our troops," Alistair sighed, crossing his arms.
"Well I actually wasn't planning on you being able to solve it, but… well, she's the Red Widow, after all. It's not every day a legend walks into my camp."
"Just… tell us what you want," Ten.
"My hunters have been going missing," he said, "Ever since we made camp last month."
"Missing where?" Alistair asked.
"In the wood to the east. First it was the herdsmen. There are wild halla that roam here, every so often we will send in a herder with a doe in heat, keep the… blood fresh, so to speak. The does returned alone. Then the hunters. Wolves. A bear or two maybe. That's what we thought at first. So we began sending them in groups of four rather than two by two, and… well, they also began disappearing. Something else is at play."
"Fine. What are we dealing with this time? Wait, no. Let me guess," Ten sighed, "Whatever it is that keeps humans from settling these hills has gotten sick of just shem."
"With a side of ancient curse and/or scary scary blood magic, and let's throw in an addled hermit living in a tree for good measure," Alistair said, "Maybe with some sentient carnivorous trees."
"Well it's werewolves, so there's that…" Zathrian said.
"Oh, you just came right out and said it," Ten observed. "So, werewolves are real now?"
"Not in the popular sense," the Keeper said, "I know the legends that make it to the settled folk entail a transformation at the full moon, over once the phase ends. In reality, it is… well, I suppose you could call it a curse, but it is such that once you turn you don't turn back. You stay in this sort of limbo between person and beast."
"And how is one supposed to distinguish a werewolf from a regular wolf?" asked Alistair.
"They can walk upright, or they can sort of… knuckle walk on all fours if they've a mind to, usually when they're climbing hills. They come out in the light as well. All times of the month. And they retain the power of speech," Zathrian said, "It's... very unsettling to be entirely honest."
"This is not the first time you have encountered the werewolves in this wood," Ten observed.
"No," Zathrian said, "It happens every so often."
"What did you do the last time? We clearly weren't here."
"It was a long time ago. There were more of us. I was younger. My trackers were able to subdue the infestation on their own. But there are so few of us now… and so many are not Dalish bred, but come from the outside. The old ways are new to them."
"Well they're that much newer to us," Ten pointed out, "But I'm guessing that just means we're expendable."
"Not expendable. Before I learned who you are I was planning to just say you were out of luck here, maybe try tracking down one of the clans in the foothills," Zathrian said.
"What do you mean by that?"
"You're the Red Widow. You are resourceful enough to kill three men while wearing a wedding dress. Lucky enough to get away with it. Guileful enough to somehow come out of the whole thing looking like damn near a national hero," Zathrian said, "We are simple guardians of the land. We are trackers. Hunters. Herders. Gatherers. We are not warriors."
"Well maybe we don't need you, then," Ten observed.
"Yes you do," Zathrian said, "You of all people know that not all fights are won on brute strength. Looking at you, none of the ones you have won have turned on such. What we offer is the most organized of forces. Our people move as limbs of a single creature. Doubly and triply so when we have joined with other clans."
"Fine. How does one deal with this werewolf problem?" Alistair asked, his patience more than thin at this point, and no doubt thinking of how much easier it would be to track the darkspawn currently ravaging the countryside with, you know, actual trackers, "I assume slaughtering the lot of them isn't on the table."
"That would deal with the problem temporarily and deprive us of many of our people, but I know something of this specific clan of werewolves. A matriarch leads them. Witherfang, they call her. I… suspect she has grown restless. If you bring me her heart, I can cure our hunters."
"So… I must beg your indulgence, if you knew all this, why did you send your hunters into this wood?" Ten asked, "Why camp here at all?"
"It is what is done," Zathrian said, as though this were any explanation, "Long before Witherfang. Long before anything. We have always made camp here for the summer."
Knowing better than the question mystical old men too closely, Ten decided just to take it as it was. "What do we do?"
"She makes her home in a ruin to the south and east of here. It's deep in the forest, and there will be all sorts of tricks and traps to turn you back around on yourself, disorient you.'
"Again, how do you know this?"
"Because that is always where she reappears, gathers her strength," Zathrian said.
"How many times have you faced Witherfang?"
"I can't even count."
"And she just, what, grows right out of the forest every few years? Is she some kind of spirit?" asked Alistair.
"Something like that. And it is less often than that," Zathrian said, "It has been than fifty years since the last time this happened. She has simply… caught us at a bad time."
"Right. All the disasters seem to be striking simultaneously this year," Alistair sighed, "Someone ought to have a word with the master astrologist in Val Royeaux."
"The stars have aligned and they're all saying 'fuck this country in particular,'" Ten agreed, "Very well. We will… stumble around the woods until we find what we're looking for. That's always worked before."
Ten spent the rest of the day nosing around the camp, ostensibly to get her hands on some more appropriate gear for mucking about in the woods, but also because she was curious about what goods the Dalish made. They didn't have any use for gold. Still, a stilted conversation in a combination of three languages with the local fletcher got her a very nice shortbow that she had no use for, in exchange for a few vials of her nastiest poisons and explanations of how each was made. The bow got her a set of leathers like the Dalish women wore, lighter than her usual armor and much more comfortable as they relied not on metal buckles, but stayed on by virtue of actually fitting her.
Later in the afternoon, the conversation around the fire was a bit tense, and Ten strongly encouraged her companions to lay off the liquor at least for the night. Alistair had already explained the issue and that they were expected to solve it, yet again. Unsurprisingly, everyone but Zevran and Morrigan refused to go further into the wood. All of them had a bad feeling about it, especially Sten. Neither he nor Ten pushed the issue. Walking quietly was not something either Sten or Oghren was very good at, and Lelianna was not recovered from her honorable battle with the sinister Dalish liquor. With some semblance of a plan, they were about to part ways for the evening when Mithra approached their camp for the second time that day.
"Come up to the main fire," she said.
"Is that an invitation or a command?" asked Ten.
"The former."
"Promise you won't give them anything to drink," Ten said.
"What? Oh… shit, did Mairali show up with maiahil last night?" She passed her eyes over Oghren and Lelianna, who were upright, but still quite obviously not at their best, "He did, didn't he. I'm going to use his guts for bowstrings, I swear… He thinks it's funny."
"Please explain the joke," Lelianna said, still green around the gills.
"Your body can't process it properly," Mithra said, "The sap it's made from is damned near poisonous to non-elves. Not like… deadly poisonous, but enough to keep you vomiting for… what was it?"
"Twelve. Sodding. Hours," Oghren said.
"Sorry about that. I'll get his wife to sneak halla milk into his next meal, see how he likes that," Mithra said.
"It seems a little counterintuitive elves can't have halla milk," Wynne observed.
"It's not just halla milk, it's any milk," Ten said, "Most elves can't digest it."
"I've seen you eat cheese," Lelianna said.
"Exactly once," Ten said, "And you'll remember I pitched my tent a good thirty feet from the rest of you that evening. You're welcome for that, by the way."
"In any case, you're welcome up there," Mithra said, rather than be suckered into further discussions of what makes who sick and when. "I promise, nothing nefarious. It's the last half moon before the equinox. Sometimes people like watching the ceremony. Most outsiders never get to see it. Looks like Zathrian has decided you're all right."
Ten was not terribly familiar with this specific ritual. Kalethrian had sprinkled a few bits of Dalish wisdom in with his Elvish lessons, but it was mainly in the context of why certain vocabulary words - such as the word for a halla mule - were relevant. He hadn't said much about ceremony.
The ritual itself wasn't all that intricate either, not like the high masses in the Chantry where the air was thick and stagnant with incense, the smoky air lit with flickering candles that distorted the features of the chanting nuns and made the world seem dark and terrible. Ten followed about half of the dialog - the spring mother - a woman wearing a cloak woven out of green vines, studded with snowdrops and crocuses, having a conversation with the wolf of winter, a man wearing the skin of a wolf so that the the upper jaw formed a hood over his head - engaging in a series of riddles that ended in the winter scampering off and the spring mother scattering the flowers from her cloak over the ground around the fire.
The whole thing took almost an hour. After about fifteen minutes, Ten had given up on whispering a - probably poor - translation to the others as no one except Morrigan seemed to be interested. When the winter wolf had retreated, it seemed that was the end of the formal part of the evening, the members of the clan who had been sitting in rapt attention broke off into their preferred social groups, and a handful of drummers hauling out their instruments and, not even exchanging a word, began beating out a complex rhythm. The drums themselves were not drums as Ten had seen, with leather heads, but hollowed out logs cut with slits that changed the pitch of the beat depending on where one struck it. Among the five drummers it seemed that they had two full octaves, and the more she listened, the more the drumbeats held both rhythm and melody. A familiar melody.
"Wait I know this one," Zevran said.
"Yeah, me too," Ten said, snapping her fingers, "It's…. Maker's breath, what's it called?"
"Well I don't know what it is here but at home it's the… ahh… the carpenter bird?"
"The what now?"
"You know, the birds that stand up on the side of the tree and knock their beaks against it like they're hammering."
"Woodpecker," Alistair offered, "They're called woodpeckers."
"Excuse me?!" Zevran exclaimed. He turned to Ten, "Is he fucking with me?"
"No, why?"
"A cock is a bird, a pecker is a bird," he ranted in frustration, "This language is filthy y no tiene ni puto sentido pero all of you are such fucking prudes still!"
"Not nearly prudish enough," Ten said. She looked up to see a handful of the clan members had risen and were dancing to the song, "They're doing it wrong," she observed, "They're not supposed to face each other."
"Explain," Sten said.
"You're going to say it's frivolous," Ten said.
"It obviously is, but I still wish to know."
"There's a dance that goes with this song, sort of a game," said Ten, "You have your partner and you do the steps, sort of like they're doing there, and you have to be very coordinated so you slap hands with your partner right at the point when the drums do that little triple beat there."
"They have made it too easy. They can see each other, look each other in the eyes," Zevran said, "In the city, you dance with your left legs tied together, so you are each facing opposite directions. It is… sort of a game. The object is to complete the steps, and the more cycles of the melody two people can complete without falling on the ground, the better."
"What is the purpose of this?" asked Sten.
"Well, it forces you to be very in tune with the person you're dancing with," Ten said, pulling this idea squarely from her ass, "It is… uh, useful for honing the mind of a warrior who must coordinate with other warriors?"
"So it is an exercise in trust?" Sten asked.
"Well no, that is not how it started," Zevran said.
"How did it start?"
"Given everything you have learned about the elves in this part of the world, why do you think they may have learned to dance with their legs tied together?" Ten asked.
"Ah," Sten breathed, his face approving, "It is a story of defiance."
"A figurative middle finger," Ten said with satisfaction.
"You chain us up, we find a way to dance anyway," Zevran said.
"Because fuck you, that's why," Ten concluded.
"The best kind," Zevran said, "Come on, manita, let us show them up."
"Oh, I don't know if I'm here for elf on elf crime tonight," Ten said. In reality, she was sort of itching to do so. She'd always been good at the game. Her record gained the summer she was ten, alongside Morran, was an hour. They probably could have kept going, but everyone was getting bored and acknowledging their victory rather than letting them keep going.
"Come on!"
"Fine," she acquiesced. They got a few stares, standing side by side facing opposite directions while Ten tied their ankles together with one of her kerchiefs, but once they got going, doing the steps much like their Dalish cousins, but without seeing each other, and still somehow their hands meeting at the appropriate beat, the stares became admiring.
After a couple of cycles, two city refugees got up to show them up, and eventually the native Dalish all gave up. After that, the four of them got together and tried a version where they formed a chain gang of four, two facing inside and two facing out, which lasted about twenty seconds before they all fell into a heap to the disappointment of the onlookers.
The gathering split up when the half moon was almost down, lighting their way back to their own camp. Ten felt a little envious of the spacious Dalish tents, but acknowledged that hopefully, one day, she would not live in one full-time.