Vir Lath Sa'vunin: Chapters Twenty-Five and Twenty-Six

[twist_shimmy]

A Dalish-centric AU gen fic featuring two Mahariel Wardens, one bastard prince, and lingering ghosts.

Title: Vir Lath Sa'vunin (We Love One More Day)
Rating: T (Language and Violence)
Authors: twist_shimmy and lenna_nightrunner
Post Word Count: 3050
Summary: When their parents died, Tesni Mahariel was left to raise her brother Caerwyn with the help of the rest of their clan. True to their penchant for getting into trouble, Caerwyn and Tamlen went hunting one day and ran afoul of a mirror, of all things. The next thing Tesni knew, Caerwyn had been recruited by the Grey Wardens. As if she’d let some shemlen just take her brother away! Determined to keep Caerwyn safe, Tesni goes after them, and antics ensue. She’ll stop the Blight to protect her family, Caerwyn will help--grumbling all the while--and Alistair will do his best to bond with his tattooed and bristly new brethren. When all is said and done, the blurred lines between friendship and blood bonds will draw them down a path that will change all three of them forever.

In which Dalish hate princes, drafts, and echoes. Special hate is reserved for beds.

Twenty-Five: No Reason to Complain, Even if Fire’s Burning (OMR)

TESNI

After so much time in the wilderness, being back in Redcliffe felt... confining. Bann Teagan made this sensation much worse by offering to put us up at the castle for our stay.

“No, tha--”

But Alistair had ahold of my arm. “Thank you, Bann Teagan. We’d love to.”

“No, we wouldn’t,” I murmured in his ear, and then jerked away indignantly as he tugged on one of my braids.

“You can’t say no to the bann, sister.”

The expression on Caerwyn’s face made me wish desperately that we could. But, the others seemed happy at the possibility of rooves and beds, so I relented and followed some poor flat-ear to my room.

When my brother set his pack down and began to make himself comfortable, the maid shuffled from foot to foot. “Ser? I’ll be showing you to your room next.”

“This is my room.” He stared at her like she was insane, and she did the same back to him. I was too confused to be diplomatic, so Alistair stepped in for me.

“Caerwyn, you’ll be in my room tonight.”

My brother’s brows lowered. “But sister....”

I looked around the room and then shrugged. “I’ll be fine.” But as they left, I was trying to remember the last time I’d slept alone. Or worse, alone inside a stone cube. But the bed looked comfortable, if far too large, and there was a basin to wash off the worst of the travel grime.

It was good that I cleaned up first thing, because while I was drying my face there was a knock on the door. “Yes?”

It was the friendly bann. “My brother is awake, my lady.”

Such an infuriating shemlen term. “Tesni,” I reminded him.

“I--yes.” He brushed his braid behind his ear. “I think we should give him the evening to rest and discuss our plan of action tomorrow.” When I nodded, he took his leave and closed the door to my bedroom, then started when I reopened it and followed him into the hall.

“Do you need something else?”

“No, just looking for my brothers.” I looked left, looked right, and walked to their room before the bann had finished telling me where they were. He blinked at me as I opened their door and let myself in.

“I’ll see you at dinner, my lady.”

Caerwyn snorted when he saw the look on my face, but Alistair looked too distracted to revel in my annoyance.

“Hey,” he said. “Just in time. I think we should tell Caerwyn about that thing.”

“What thing?”

He made a strange face at me. “That... thing. You know. That I told you about?”

My brother stared at me while I rubbed my forehead. Of course, that thing about Alistair being the son of a king. How could I forget? “You haven’t told him?”

“You told me not to!”

I crossed my arms. “I distinctly remember including a ‘yet’ in that sentence.”

“Well, then. Now’s the time, right?” Alistair gave me a charming smile, and I wished I could leave the room. It wasn’t fair that I had to explain this, especially since I had only a vague notion of what this meant in the shem world other than trouble. But Alistair’s eyebrows made it clear that he had no intention of doing it himself.

“Caerwyn, you know how you and I are the children of our clan’s old keeper before Marethari?” He shrugged. “Alistair’s father was kind of like a keeper. He was the king.”

“So?”

“Blood is important to shemlen. He’s what they call a... prince, I think.” When Alistair nodded, I sighed. “It means he can be king, and people might want him to be now that their boyking is dead.”

Caerwyn’s eyes narrowed. “You’re a noble,” he spat at Alistair.

“N-no, I--”

He turned to me. “And you didn’t tell me.”

I crossed my arms. “You had enough on your mind.”

My brother responded by leaving the room, and Alistair frowned at me. “That... didn’t go very well, did it?”

I shook my head and watched the door click shut. “You’re not bleeding. I call it a success.”

“I really need to learn when you’re joking.” He pouted and rubbed at the back of his neck, and I changed the subject until dinner.

Typically I sat between my lin’len and dorf’len, but Caerwyn arrived to the high table before us and chose a spot near Sten instead. Zevran took my brother’s normal place beside me, and Leliana sat across, watching the three of us with worried eyes.

Well, not us, really. Mostly she seemed worried about my brother. It made sense now why he referred to her so often as the staring woman, but I was beginning to wonder if she watched him for the same reason she did me.

That was an interesting enough thought to get me through what apparently had been meant as a formal dinner. Caerwyn and I were the only ones still in the clothes we wore under our armor; even Sten had gotten a clean shirt from somewhere. The shemlen, who appeared quite adept at entertaining other humans and absolutely abysmal at doing so for mixed company, finally allowed the conversation to die after our qunari made an ill-timed remark about mages and leashes.

At least after that, the shems stopped looking at my brother and me like we were the savages.

After the painful silence at the dinner table, the soft quiet of my room was a relief. I was removing tangles from my hair with my fingers at the mirror when a knock on the door nearly sent me lunging for my bow--stupid room echoed worse than a cave--but it turned out to just be Leliana.

“Tesni, I--” She hovered in the doorway. “Is your brother well?”

I shook my head. She might as well know what she was getting herself into. “He’ll be fine. This is why I didn’t want to stay in the castle.” That, and how dead the air felt; in certain rooms, I could still catch traces of decay in the air.

“This is hard for him, isn’t it?” She took a few steps into the room, and I nodded and gestured for her to come in the rest of the way.

“He’s never handled change well, in all honesty.” Creators only knew what he would be doing if I hadn’t come along.

Leliana hadn’t moved from the center of the room. I sat on the edge of my strangely large bed and stared at her while the silence stretched on.

“I’m sorry,” she said at last. “I’ve been thinking about what you said at the campfire that night, and I will not feel right until I tell you that I....” She seemed to be looking for the right words. “That I was wrong.”

I shook my head. “I shouldn’t have snapped at you.”

She smiled and took a few steps further into the room. “Well, it caused me to realize what I was doing, so perhaps it was a good thing.”

“You like my brother.” As soon as I saw her shoulders tense, I decided I should have phrased it as a question.

Her smile faded. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“You know what I mean, Leliana.”

She looked down at her hands. “He’s good with languages, and he’s honest.” There was a telling expression on her face as she added, “And adorable.” Her eyes darted to mine for a moment, checking my reaction.

“Yes,” I admitted at last, “he is.”

Leliana raised an eyebrow at me. “I thought that you might not like me being... interested in your brother.”

I decided to pretend that she wasn’t referring to the Dalish hatred of shemlen. I couldn’t think of her as a member of my new clan and yet get upset if she was attracted to Caerwyn.

“He’s old enough to handle these things on his own, Lel. I only have to worry if it turns sour.” Our eyes met again, and this time I narrowed mine. “He won’t be as tolerant as I am if you treat him like something less than a person.”

“I’m sorry about all that.” She bowed her head. “You are so hard to read, Tesni. You never smile, or frown, or.... You don’t seem less than human. You just don’t seem... real.”

It was my turn to look down at my hands, which made her keep talking. “I know that you are doing it for your brother’s sake, but everyone has commented on it. Even Alistair.”

When I didn’t respond, she apologized again and left the room, and I stashed a knife beneath my pillow before trying to sleep.

It was odd to be surrounded by so much cloth and not touch anyone on either side of me. I could still feel my brothers in my blood, but they were too far away for it to be soothing. Instead, my blood pricked and burned, and I kept repeating Leliana’s last few words in my head.

There was one upside to sleeping in a room alone: for once, I could let myself cry. For the first time, I understood the shemlen desire for privacy.

---

Twenty-Six: She’s Got You High and You Don’t Even Know Yet (Mumm-Ra)

CAERWYN

“Da’len’dinⁱ,” I grumbled to myself as I lay in the stupid squishy bed alone. Alistair knew better than to say anything, and sat silently on the other bed looking determinedly toward the window like I wasn’t saying anything.

I wasn’t a child. Sure, it hadn’t been that long ago that I’d gotten my vallaslin, but I hadn’t been a child in a very long time. When was Tesni going to stop trying to protect me from everything? I was grateful she was there to look after me and comfort me when I needed it, but that didn’t mean I wanted her to keep the truth from me.

And now Alistair was doing it too. I was older than he was! Easily old enough to be his father, maybe even his grandfather. If anyone was a child, it was him.

A king’s child. A ‘prince.’ I still didn’t understand exactly what that meant, but I knew enough to guess that it wasn’t good for our situation. Alistair hadn’t seemed happy about it, anyway. I hadn’t really had any concept of politics until we met these nobles, and now that I did they just annoyed me. Leave it to shemlen to waste time fighting each other over who was going to lead them instead of just picking a leader to pull them together to fight the actual enemy.

I heard Alistair crawling beneath his blankets and I rolled over and faced away from him, staring at the wall in the darkness and fuming about him and Tesni and shemlen and darkspawn and everything else until he started snoring, and then I stared and fumed some more.

After tossing and turning for over an hour, I gave up on sleep and got out of bed. I pulled a heavy shirt on and went to explore the building. I’d never been in anyplace like it--all cold stone and high ceilings and echoes.

I wandered into a room that was warmer than the drafty halls and had a fire crackling in a stone alcove in the wall. It seemed like a nice place to sit and think for a while. But when I looked over at one of the chairs I saw someone sitting in it.

“Oh. Sorry,” I said, and turned to leave.

“Don’t go,” said Leliana. “I was just reading because I couldn’t sleep.”

When she held up a book I looked around. The walls of the room were lined with shelves, and every shelf was packed full of books. Hundreds of them. I’d only ever seen that many books at the mage tower.

"You study magic?" I asked. Just when I'd begun to think she was all right.

She gave me a strange look. "No."

"Then why are you reading?"

"I don't understand what you mean."

"Books have spells in them." It was perfectly logical to me: books had spells in them, so why was she reading if she didn’t study magic?

Leliana stared at me for a moment like she was trying to figure out whether or not I was serious. Then she shook her head and laughed. "Books have all kinds of things in them."

I raised an eyebrow at her.

"Most books are not about magic at all." Her tone told me that this was something she thought everyone knew, and I suppressed the urge to roll my eyes--barely.

Instead, I examined the shelves. "...Then what's in them?"

"History, philosophy, stories. All sorts of things.” Her gaze followed mine as my eyes took in the different colors and symbols. “I'm very lucky to be able to use Arl Eamon's library. I haven't seen so many books in a long time."

I shrugged and nodded my head at the book in her lap. "What's that one?"

Leliana smiled down at it and ran her hand over its cover almost affectionately. "Can't you guess?"

What else? "Stories."

She looked back up at me. “C’est vraisⁱⁱ.”

“Can’t you just remember them?”

In response to my confusion, Leliana laughed. I was beginning to get annoyed with how she always acted like my questions were silly. Like even children knew the answers. Shemlen children probably did.

“There are far too many stories for even a bard to remember,” she said. “There are as many stories as people in the world, and more. Some of them are very old, and might have been forgotten if they were not written down in books.”

I didn’t say anything. It still seemed strange to not just be able to remember the stories you were told. Our people had done it for centuries.

"And look,” she continued, “some have been written in more than one language." She held the book out, and I tried to see the differences in the symbols between the two sections she showed me. I wasn't sure I would've noticed they weren't the same if she hadn't pointed it out, but there were little things that were different. I wondered why that was, and which language was which. "See?"

I turned my head to the side. "Sort of."

"What do you mean?"

"I can't read."

"You--Oh!" She flushed. "I'm sorry."

"Why?"

"I wasn't thinking. The Dalish don't have a written language, do they?"

"Not anymore.” Is this elvish? Written elvish?

"So you remember everything?” Leliana raised her eyebrows in either amazement or disbelief, I wasn’t sure which. “Everything you're told?"

I shrugged again. "Most of it."

"Do you know any Dalish stories?"

"Of course."

Leliana’s eyes lit up with excitement. "Would you tell me one? I'd love to hear it."

“No.” When she frowned and looked away, I explained. “Tesni’s the storyteller.”

“Oh.” She was staring at the open book in her lap and I sensed another awkward silence developing.

“Tell me that one.” I pointed at the book.

Leliana looked up at me. “You want me to read it to you?”

I nodded.

“All right.” She motioned to the large chair next to hers and I sat down in it. She picked up the book and began, “Long ago there was a--”

"En Orlesian."

"But you won't understand,” she protested.

"I will eventually."

She stifled a laugh, turned the pages, and began reading.

I sat in the chair and listened with my eyes closed so I could focus on the words and create an image in my head. Translating familiar words helped me figure out what the ones around them meant, but after a while I was too tired to translate anymore. I could hear the emotion and the action in her voice as she read, and soon the words didn't matter anymore. Her tone was soothing, and it wasn't long before I....



Green. No, not again.



"Caerwyn?" Leliana was standing over me with her hand on my shoulder. I blinked and quickly pulled back from her (though the chair wouldn't let me get very far). Usually if I woke up to anyone but Tesni--or Alistair now--near me my instinct was to get away and ask questions later. "What's wrong?"

"Just a nightmare," Tesni said from the doorway, offering no further explanation. Alistair was close behind her, red-eyed and running his fingers through his hair to shake off sleep. As soon as I saw them, I wasn’t angry anymore. I could feel them there from across the room and the stinging in my blood began to ease.

Leliana looked confused, but didn’t ask questions. “Come on, lin’len,” Tesni said to me. “It’s past your bedtime.” Only she could make those words sound like an apology.

My brother yawned, triggering both Tesni and me to do the same.

“I suppose it’s past mine, too,” Leliana said. She closed the book she’d been reading to me and put it back in its place on the shelf. “Good night.”

I nodded at her sleepily, and Tesni and Alistair echoed her: “Good night.”

Neither Alistair nor I argued when Tesni muttered something about “stupid, big shem-beds” and dragged us into her room. Curled up together in a bed that might’ve been big enough to fit even a fourth person, we all slept soundly through the rest of the night.

---

iDa'len'din: (I'm) not a child.

iiC'est vrais: “That's right.”

You are so hard to read, Tesni. You never smile, or frown, or....