You manage to get the horses saddled, thanks to Blackwall and Dorian’s help. The two of them keep their petty bickering to a minimum, to your relief. It’s not that you don’t believe Dorian has been a prat to Blackwall; you’re pretty sure he has, actually, because he’s been a prat to you, too. But so has Blackwall. So has pretty much everyone here. Can no one else see a foot in the mouth for what it is? Is it really just your experience with Tevinter that gives you the upper hand here? Surely there must be more to it than that.
You puzzle it over in your head as the group mounts up and heads out. The ahead party today is Blackwall, Dorian, and Cole, which is truly hilarious to you. Poor Blackwall. Poor Dorian. The Inquisitor jokes about sending you along with them, and you almost wish he would, if only because you’ve been left with him and Seeker Pentaghast, who might as well be in their own world, plus Sera and Solas, who might as well be worlds apart. What a nightmare group all around. You make the quick decision to fall in next to Solas before you’ve even started moving faster than a stately walk.
“How does the Inquisitor pick these ahead teams?” you murmur quietly to him. You can’t imagine that these two groups look cohesive to anyone at all. You’re mostly just hoping Blackwall and Dorian pause in fighting long enough to actually be on the lookout for danger.
Clearly, you weren’t quiet enough; either that or the Inquisitor has some elf-sharp ears, because he’s the one who answers you. “I have no doubt I can explain my own motivation better than Solas,” he says, mercifully sounding amused rather than annoyed. “The most important thing is that there always needs to be someone who can send off a signal… a mage, mostly, but Sera can serve the purpose as well. Then, because mages-and-Sera are inherently squishy and run the risk of being aggressively murdered in case of an ambush, I always want to have someone sturdy and skilled in melee combat. Myself, Cassandra, or Blackwall, in this case.”
“And then Cole,” Seeker Pentaghast adds, a little sarcastically. You can’t quite connect her with “Cassandra” in your mind.
“Not always Cole,” the Inquisitor protests. “I just send him a lot because he’s so weirdly good at detecting ambushes.”
Yeah, you can’t imagine why.
“The one thing that isn’t much of a worry when I pick ahead teams is personalities,” he continues, a little dryly, as if he knew exactly why you’d been wondering in the first place. “Since I trust that members of the Inquisition’s Inner Circle can just fucking suck it up and deal with it.”
You were not expecting the Inquisitor to say anything like that, let alone so crass, so you almost choke, your laughter coming out halfway as a cough. Possibly the cough is also in pure shock that you laughed at something the Inquisitor said. Even if it was just because you were surprised by it.
“If you laugh at him, you’ll only encourage him,” Seeker Pentaghast says, very dryly. “And his terrible, terrible sense of humor.”
“Cassandra, I’m hurt!” protests the Inquisitor, not looking even slightly hurt. He’s grinning broadly. “I thought you liked my jokes! You laugh more than anyone else.”
“Which is why I know what a bad decision it is,” she rebuts.
“I suppose that’s true. One time I told a joke so bad that the tavern started throwing bread crumbs at me.”
“I can believe it.”
“That’s okay, though, because I took it with a grain assault—” he just manages to get out before Sera groans loudly.
“I’ll throw something worse at you!”
Seeker Pentaghast, however, has started giggling. It’s definitely giggling. There’s no other word for it and it’s making you deeply uncomfortable. She’s kind of… something. A handful of adjectives are coming to mind, but you don’t feel comfortable applying any of them to Seeker Pentaghast. It’s unnerving, seeing this side of both of them, although it can only be a good sign. If they’re relaxing around you, it means they don’t find you suspicious, or at least less suspicious than you could be.
That doesn’t mean you want to be their friend, however. The last thing you want is to get pulled into another “chess” type scenario, but this time with a Seeker or the Inquisitor. It’s bad enough with the Commander, and he’s almost tolerable to be around. When one squints and tries to forget about everything he got up to in Kirkwall.
You wonder, briefly, how he feels about what has to be one of the worst chapters of his life being written down and published to be judged by the masses. Or maybe he’s proud of his actions in Kirkwall. You can’t imagine anyone’s really given him cause to change his mind. If he regrets anything, it’s probably simply the consequences.
You wonder if the Inquisitor will ever live to regret his actions now. Die the hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain, they say. Lucky for you, you skipped being a hero altogether. If you’re already a villain, perhaps you can live forever.
When the group meets up for lunch, Dorian and Blackwall look exactly as strained as you would have expected. You try to imagine being stuck with no one but someone you detest—Seeker Pentaghast for instance—for company. Well, that and Cole, whose incessant prattling attempts at ice-breakers would be even worse than silence. Nothing like having your weak spots prodded directly in front of your enemy.
Cole gives you a look that tells you in no uncertain circumstances that Cole heard you think that, and you respond with an apologetic smile. Maker knows you like the way Cole talks, but it does make you nervous. You imagine others probably feel even more strongly about it.
Despite that, however, you break away from the group with him, taking him to sit under a tree a little ways away from camp. You grab some bread out of your pack on the way, just so that you can honestly say you ate something, should someone ask. You suspect Cole would probably forget that you even needed to eat, were no one to remind him, but Solas is the sort of person who would ask, and Cole is the kind of person who would tell him the truth.
“They’re not that different,” Cole says, sounding frustrated. You try not to smile, but instead nod and let him vent, in his odd, passive way, about Dorian and Blackwall. It’s clear that he wants to help, but just hasn’t figured out how to do it yet. “They should learn about each other, instead of assuming they already know.”
“If people did that, we’d have significantly less conflict,” you comment dryly.
“Yes!” Cole agrees vehemently, and you struggle not to laugh. He’s being genuine, and you shouldn’t laugh at him. It’s not like he’s wrong. Even you do that, though you’re a bit loathe to admit it. Your judgments are normally based in past experience, and you’re unwilling to let that go when jumping to those conclusions has saved you so much pain in the past. “Blackwall likes you now. Maybe you could make him see,” Cole suggests.
You snort. “Me? I couldn’t even convince him to like me for over a month. And I’m genuinely uncertain why he changed his mind.”
“Hard working, kind to animals, always in the middle of things. Traits not often found in someone sleeping their way to the top,” Cole intones. You choke on your bread.
“He thought I was what?! That’s why he didn’t like me?” you demand. Cole just nods, and you have to laugh. “Well, I guess it’s not like he’s the only one,” you admit, thinking about the rumors about you that flit around Skyhold. Although they seem to have settled on Solas after the trip to Val Royeaux, you’re still probably sleeping with the Iron Bull, Fenris, half the Chargers, Belassan, and Maker knows who else, according to popular rumor.
You have to laugh, or you’ll get angry about it, and you’ll probably stay angry about it.
Speaking of anger… when you glance over towards where the others are eating, you catch Seeker Pentaghast watching you. She glances away when she catches sight of your glare, but the irritation you’d been trying to chase off with laughter seeps in. That absolute—
“Not safe, they seem friendly to dig their claws into the unsuspecting,” Cole begins, but you cut him off.
“Don’t defend her to me,” you snap. “I know damn well exactly what she’s thinking without you telling me. That’s exactly what pisses me off.”
“Thinks she knows him better than me, thinks she knows me better than me. She sees the ocean only from a lifeguard’s point of view.”
“Meanwhile, I’m just trying to make friends with the fish,” you agree, giving Cole a fond squeeze of the shoulders. “I don’t need to be dragged out by someone who thinks that just knowing how to swim makes her an expert.”
“She doesn’t know you know how to swim,” Cole points out, and you grumble under your breath. Just because he has a point doesn’t mean you have to agree with Seeker Pentaghast’s bullshit. “Frolicking with sharks like they’re dolphins.”
“If she ever met a dolphin, she wouldn’t know what to do with it,” you snort. You doubt many here have ever even seen them. The Iron Bull, maybe, if he spent a lot of time on the warm seas around Seheron or Par Vollen. “She thinks they’re all sharks because that’s all she’s seen.”
“Wouldn’t you?” Cole asks, and you frown again.
“I know better. Dolphins have always been more dangerous than sharks, and ‘just don’t swim’ has never been good advice. Nor has just stabbing wildly on the off-chance you hit a man-eater,” you add, squeezing Cole’s shoulder a little more protectively. Cole might appreciate her watching him, making sure he doesn’t make a mistake. But you don’t trust her to know what a mistake looks like. You don’t trust her judgment on the best of days, let alone with the life of your friend.
Your only comfort in sending Cole off with Dorian and Blackwall is that Seeker Pentaghast is staying with you. It’s a very cold comfort, and cold is also the way you shoulder past her while navigating to your mount. You know very well you should be treating her with the same friendliness you treat everyone else. You know being stand-offish is a risk; being all fangs to her when you’re a tame kitten with everyone else is suspicious. But you can’t quite crush your pride enough to be able to bend as low as you’d need to be to kiss her boots.
You want to sulk in peace, but riding ‘by yourself’ instead of directly next to Solas just results in Sera swooping in next to you basically immediately. It’s hard to stay in a bad mood around her. Well, except for when she’s making your mood worse, but she seems to have gotten over the sight of you on a hart. Thank goodness. You don’t have the energy to pretend not to be elfy around her, not with Revas and Solas here, not with so many other things on your mind.
Ironically, this leaves the Seeker to chat with Solas intermittently, which is a somewhat surreal thing for you to see. They don’t seem to get along in the fire-and-oil manner of Seeker Pentaghast and yourself, to your surprise. You wouldn’t mind asking him how he can stand to chat amiably with her, actually, but doing so would flatly betray exactly your own opinions on the woman, and you’d rather not. You might be keeping your distaste for her a somewhat poor secret, but you can certainly keep hiding the sheer depths of it. Let everyone think that you just tire of her needling you, or dislike her hostility towards Cole.
Despite your general and repeated irritation towards Seeker Pentaghast, Sera really does manage to distract you. Now that both of you know the other was in Val Royeaux, it opens up a whole new topic for complaint, one that you can absolutely both enjoy. You’re regailing her with horror stories about the nobles you served as a maid when you first came to Val Royeaux as a rough little whelp. You’d had a crash-course in Rivaini manners but it had done remarkably little to prepare you for the realities of Val Royeaux. Fortunately, you had been trained as a servant young, and one horrible noble was much like another.
“My general rule of thumb was to just look really clueless and docile whenever they started on about anything,” you’re telling Sera, during one of the little lulls where you’re walking instead of galloping. “I got a reputation for being an absolute imbecile, but it got me into a lot of weird events. People love a servant they think is too stupid to understand anything past delivering wine glasses.”
“I’ll say,” Sera says, rolling her eyes. “Prats. I proly got three quarters of all my information that way.”
“Probably some of it from me,” you say with a snort. “I did not have tight lips. Who would? Even the nice ones treated us like pets.” You shrug, irritated and not, at the memory. It had been annoying, but it had been incredibly useful. You’re sure Sera agrees. Or, well, pretty sure. It’s so hard to imagine someone as remarkably unsubtle as her actually being involved in the Game to the kind of extent she apparently was.
The two of you… reminisce, for lack of a better word, about Val Royeaux on and off for the rest of the afternoon. It’s a safer topic than Denerim, around the others. It isn’t exactly a secret, where the two of you are from, but you seem to be operating on some unspoken promise not to bring it up in public. The others seem to be mostly ignoring you, but you don’t trust that they actually would, so you watch what you say and paint a pretty picture of an elven maid in Val Royeaux, with no ulterior motives and no connections.
Sera mostly tells you of the shit she’s gotten up to, some of which you knew about, most of which you didn’t. Red Jenny had only been on the peripheral of your useful contacts in Val Royeaux, and she’d been an inconvenience as much as she’d been helpful. Which makes perfect sense now that you know who was behind it. You can’t imagine Sera being consistently anything, other than perhaps equal parts attractive and exhausting.
Her storytime keeps going, on and off, even after you’ve stopped moving for the day and are setting up camp. By then, however, they’ve become even more exciting and animated, and everyone’s listening in. You even wind up getting dragged in yourself, when she decides that she wants to tell a good one that was much more recent than Val Royeaux.
“So there he was, sound asleep… At least I really hoped he was sound asleep,” you’re telling a satisfyingly rapt audience made up of everyone but the Inquisitor and the Seeker, who are off doing combat drills or something. “And I’m balancing on this Maker-cursed ladder while trying to unscrew bolts with one hand as quietly and quickly as possible.”
“She was shaking like a leaf; woulda thought she was scared o’ heights if I didn’t know better,” Sera was giggling.
“So finally I manage to get the damn thing disconnected, and of course it immediately starts tipping.” You windmill your arms dramatically, stumbling backwards as if you’ve lost your balance to emphasize your point. Sera catches you as you stagger backwards into her.
“I was down there to catch it, drama queen,” she scoffs as you slump uselessly back against her, grinning. “She scrambles down like her ass in on fire, yeah, and we have to tilt it over to get it out the door.”
“How in the world were you not caught by a guard at this stage?” Solas asks, sounding intensely amused. He’s half sprawled out on the grass, one arm up to support his head. The others are all in similar stages of rest around the campfire; you and Sera have been amusing them with your Skyhold antics for a while now.
“We walked real casual,” Sera informs him proudly.
“Nothing to see here, just two elves with a ladder!” you add with a giggle. “I thought for sure she was gonna tell me to hurl it off the side of Skyhold. Just strand the poor Commander up there.”
“Least then he’d rest!” Sera jokes. “Naw, we just hid it out by the tavern.”
“I was so sure it was you, Sera, when I heard his ladder had gone missing. But Emma. I’m scandalized!” Dorian says, looking anything but. He’s been at the receiving end of your pranks more than once.
“What can I say,” you say dryly. “I have layers.”
“As if your antics with the lizards hadn’t proven that by now,” Blackwall laughs. “I thought Sera had pulled you into that, but…”
“No, she’s a little imp all on her own,” Dorian says with a scoff. “Should I tell them about the herring?”
“That was such a good one,” you say, grinning to yourself.
“It really wasn’t!”
“Is this about the time you got into a fish fight with the Chargers? I heard about that,” Sera comments.
“How in the Maker’s name did you hear about that? Who was watching us throw fish at each other?” you marvel.
“Wait, so that actually happened and isn’t a horrible euphemism?” Blackwall instantly wants to know.
“Krem, herrings, and I go way, way back,” you reply cryptically.
“It’s a good thing for everyone that you two never ran into each other back in Val Royeaux,” Dorian says dryly. “No one in the whole city would have had a moment of peace.”
Little do any of them know, you absolutely had. You were just both wearing other people’s names at the time. Just as well. You had really bad luck with girls in Val Royeaux.
That thought sobers you somewhat, so you excuse yourself to make sure the horses are settled in okay for the night.
They’re fine, of course, but you find some comfort in brushing down the harts… and even the horses, which you’re starting to get a bit more accustomed to. Somewhat. They smell like the stables, which is comforting, and they’re large and warm with soft noses that remind you of Bella.
If only they would stop trying to step on your feet or eat your hair.
You’re half-brushing, half-laying-on Daine when Solas finds you. You watch him with sleepy eyes, wishing that he’d get less sleep so you could get more.
“It’s Sunday,” he says, which is not what you expected. You blink, momentarily confused. “I believe we have some free time before we must turn in for the night. Assuming you don’t wish just to start sleeping now,” he adds, sarcastically.
“…Really?” you ask, standing up more straight and trying to rub the exhaustion out of your eyes. You hadn’t even thought about what would become of your elven lessons once you were on the road. You’d just sort of assumed they’d stop out of necessity, you suppose, if you’d considered it at all.
“Certainly. I don’t particularly have our regular resources with us, but we can work on your oratory skills.” You mentally thank him for saying oratory instead of oral.
“They could use some work,” you joke for your own amusement anyway. “I’m out of practice.”
“More like you were never taught properly in the first place,” he replies with a roll of his eyes, and it’s all you can do not to burst out into childish giggling.
“Well, lucky for us both that you’re hear to teach me, then,” you declare with a smirk that only gets you a slightly puzzled look in exchange. “Where shall we do it? Hidden behind a tree? Off in the grass?”
“Might as well go to one of our tents. It will be easier to have a reasonable amount of light there, without disturbing the others by practicing by the fire.”
You burst out into an absolute fit of the very childish giggles you’d been trying to fight off earlier.
“…Are you feeling alright? Perhaps the long hours on the road are fatiguing you overmuch…” he wonders, frowning. You attempt to wheeze out a response.
“Totally fine! Totally fine, let’s get to my tent.”
You manage to steer Solas to your tent without any—okay, without many—additional giggles. Which you’re choosing to blame on the lack of sleep, ignoring the fact that you’ve been getting more sleep lately than you had in like a solid month.
Of course, then you and Solas are alone in your tent. It’s not a particularly large tent, space enough for probably three people to cram into and lay down in if they were all very comfortable with each other. Two grown adults trying to move around in it have to be at similar levels of comfort, really, and you’re very much not. This is exactly why you hadn’t wanted to share a tent with Sera.
You remind yourself a few times that it’s Cole’s tent too, and he could pop in any time. That helps, a bit, at least with the unnerving sense of privacy. An unrealistic sense, frankly, given that it’s just canvas and anyone standing particularly close could absolutely overhear anything that happened inside. It’s hardly Solas’s sound-proofed spellcasting room. You remind yourself of that a few more times, just in case it helps. It doesn’t.
“So! Elven!” you say, voice a little higher than it should be. “Elven, and my shitty, shitty pronunciation thereof.”
Solas snorts. “Well, I’ve certainly heard… worse. If not less consistent.”
“You could have just stopped talking after ‘worse,’” you say with a scowl.
“I could have,” he agrees. He reaches into his bag as you continue scowling, and pulls out what looks to be a rather old, leather-bound journal. “Let’s begin.”
He has you read from a book of poetry. A different book of poetry than you’d seen before, this one very handwritten. It’s obviously an original, since you can see places where lines were scratched out and rewritten, words scribbled in the margins. You marvel at it. Where does he get these things?
He focuses on your speech, rather than your vocabulary, which means you don’t actually know half of what you’re reading. But it’s satisfying nonetheless. You’d always figured Elven to be an inconsistent language in terms of pronunciation, much akin to modern Tevene. Turns out, no, there are just grammar rules that you’d never managed to figure out, reverse engineering the language from written word the way you were.
“Wait,” you say, pausing on a word. “Is this a derivative of harel?”
“If you stop every time you have a vocabulary question,” Solas begins, for about the twelfth time that night.
“Wait, no, I’ve actually had a question about this forever,” you say, pouting. “The rest of this poem sounds kind of light-hearted. Given the fact that most modern scholars define ‘harel’ as the verb ‘to betray,’ it seems a little odd.”
“Was that your question?” Solas asks dryly.
“I thought people were supposed to get more patient as they aged,” you reply sourly, then rush on before he can snap back. “I’ve kind of theorized for a while that harel had a different meaning back in the day. It might still amongst some Dalish, for all I know, but I’m working with what I’ve got. Do you know if that’s true? What does it mean?”
“To deceive, or to lie,” Solas says simply.
“Did it ever mean to like… prank?”
“To trick, more accurately, but yes, it could be used in a similar manner. And is here, before you ask. Now, will you consent to continue butchering the language?”
“Ass,” you say with a scowl. “This is why you get tricked by me and Sera,” you say in Elven, immediately applying your new knowledge.
“Oh, is that why?” he replies dryly, in Common. “And here I thought being a trickster was simply your nature.”
The dual meaning of the world ‘harellan’ makes you freeze, although you manage not to flinch. You’d heard something similar not that long ago, from Adahlen. He wasn’t the first and he wouldn’t be the last, but it’s easy to convince yourself that Solas just meant trickster and nothing else. Though he probably knows more about your ‘nature’ than anyone else here save for Cole.
“Your antics in Val Royeaux, for instance,” he says, as if following your train of thought. “You could easily have shared some of those by the fire this evening.”
You shake your head. You struggle to find the right words. It would be difficult even in Common, frankly, but you reply in Elven. “Vir var’tarenal.” You pause, uncertain if you said it right.
“Vir var’tarenal,” Solas repeats, and you think he must be correcting you, but you can’t detect the difference between how he said it and you did. You realize, after a moment’s puzzling, that he’s not correcting you.
He’s agreeing.