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peopleofthedas2011-02-01 08:34 pm
Vir Lath Sa'vunin: Chapters Forty-Five and Forty-Six
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
Authors: ![[personal profile]](https://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
twist_shimmy and lenna_nightrunner
Post Word Count: 3350
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 this installment, everyone bleeds.
Chapter Forty-Five: I Survived Because I Surrendered to the Rules (eXIT cLOV)
TESNI
I saw very little of Zevran, but a great deal of Sergeant Kylon over the next few days. Zev said he was off “collecting information,” and after a serious look at the coin I’d brought with us and how much two rooms cost per week, I set my focus on collecting money.
Creators above, but the shems stared at me oddly when I went to the marketplace. Even when Shale was nearby. That was a bad sign. The flat-ears did too, which was even worse. Elgar’nan tucked his tail and pressed close to my leg and growled at anyone who looked at us for too long.
“Ah, no escort again today?” Sergeant Kylon looked nervously at Shale, who chuckled.
I sighed. “Oh, he’s close by.” Maybe. “Got any side jobs for me?”
He nodded. “If you feel like killing some thugs.” I listened as he told me where to go, and was about to leave when he frowned at me and added, “Look, be careful moving around. My men have all been told to ignore you, but that’s no guarantee, especially because you’re an elf with a very large bow.”
“Any suggestions?”
“Other than wearing plainclothes and ditching your stone-faced friend? Stick to the market, the alleys, and the docks. That leaves you either near my men, or no guards at all.”
Shale, Elgar’nan, and I made short work of the thugs, and were on our way back to the market to sell their weapons and tell the sergeant what we had done when we were ambushed by four men in light armor. They were too close for my longbow, so I reached for the dagger at my hip--
--and felt only belt. Zevran still had it.
“Nothing personal, gorgeous,” the one closest to me said. “Just making a living. You know how it is. Man with the money says we find Wardens, we go do it.”
I gave him a wide smile. “Of course.”
One step closer, and I’d kicked him in the crotch with a well-aimed boot. As he went down, I tossed dirt into the eyes of the man beside him, then ducked the blades coming from behind me. Elgar’nan leaped upon the blinded man and tore into his neck, leaving him bloody and still in the dirt of the alley. His blade clattered from his hands, and I sent it into the gut of the man behind me as Shale turned the other’s ribs into paste with a single, massive punch.
“Stop,” I ordered, and they froze beside the remaining man, who was splayed on the ground, clutching his groin and staring at each of his dead comrades in turn. I crouched beside him with my new blade in hand and smiled again. “Let’s chat.”
“Sure, sure,” he gasped.
“Who’s the man with the money?” When he didn’t answer immediately, I began tracing the dagger-tip up his thigh toward the skirt of his leathers.
“T-T-T-Teryn Howe.”
“Where can I find him?”
I didn’t expect him to laugh. “He’ll find you soon enough, torch-hair. I wouldn’t want to rush the meeting if I were you.”
Before I could retort, he punched me in the teeth and then sent his elbow into my nose, turning my vision white and red. My dagger plunged down, seeking the artery running up his inner thigh, and struck only dirt. I spat blood onto the path and heard retreating boots and an ominous rumbling.
Then, silence.
When my vision cleared, both of Shale’s fists were coated in blood, and the alley reeked of death. Elgar’nan whined and licked at me, and I shoved him away in panic.
“No!”
His ears drooped.
The conniving son of a shem had injured my lip and nose both. I wiped at the blood flowing freely down my face. “You could get sick.”
Elgar’nan sat beside me and whined as I hacked and spit, but didn’t come near me again. When I showed no signs of stopping bleeding, I sighed and turned to the corpses beside me.
While I was looting my would-be captors, I cut a strip of cloth from the one with the cleanest undershirt and held it to my face to absorb the worst of the blood as I kept walking. I didn’t want to be anywhere near those bodies if a patrol came by.
If the humans of Denerim had been staring at me before, now they were gawking. The worst of the bleeding had stopped by the time I found Sergeant Kylon again, but based on how swollen the lower portion of my face felt, I was beginning to bruise nicely.
“Maker’s blood, Warden, what happened to you?”
I ran my tongue gingerly along my lower lip and tasted metal. “Studded leather glove. Your alleys should be much improved, though.”
He stepped forward and looked down at my face. “May I?” When I nodded, he lifted my chin with a finger and tilted my head from side to side. “That’s going to scar if you don’t get it looked at soon. Why not head back to the Pearl? As sad as it is to say, Sanga knows a thing or two about fixing up wounds so they don’t scar.”
“Thank you.” I met his eyes. “Where can I find Teryn Howe?”
Kylon’s hand dropped, and he shook his head. “There’s only so much I can do for you, Warden.”
I wasn’t the least bit surprised to hear him say that. “Tesni,” I sighed.
“Thank you. It’s a sight safer calling you by your given name than your bloody title out here in the streets, that’s for sure.” He pressed a small pouch into my hand. “Here’s my thanks for today. Go get your face seen to, and find me again once you’ve healed up.”
By the time I was back at the whorehouse, my head was throbbing in time with my pulse. The woman in charge took one look at my face and darted from where she had been standing behind the bar. Soon there were hands on my shoulders, politely but firmly guiding me down into an overstuffed chair while she barked orders for water and salves “and the stitch kit.”
Wonderful.
“Careful,” I hissed when she began dabbing a damp cloth along my face. My clan was used to being exceedingly cautious by now, but she was just some woman I barely knew. “Don’t get my blood on you.”
“Shh,” she replied. “You’re not the first Warden we’ve seen at the Pearl, and you won’t be the last, believe me.” When I fell silent, she resumed wiping at my face.
I swallowed thickening blood and grimaced as it slid down my throat. “Has Zevran been by yet today?”
“We haven’t seen him since the last time you came in, love. Now hold on to something. This is going to sting.”
An understatement. I expected some sort of salve, and what I got was a needle pressing through the skin of my lip. Two stitches later, and she was daubing something blessedly cool on my bruises while I silently ordered my eyes to stop watering. They didn’t listen.
“Let’s get you something to take the edge off. What’s your poison?” When I stared at her blankly, she swallowed a laugh. “Don’t drink much, I take it?”
“No.”
“We’ll start you on some cider, then.”
Two tankards later and I was feeling much more relaxed and nearly pain-free. Sanga had moved me to a corner table where I could have my back to a wall and keep out of sight of most of the others, but she came back over when she noticed me picking dried blood out of my hair.
“Why don’t we wash that? You’ll feel much better.”
I shook my head. “S’what got me into trouble. The color,” I added when she crossed her arms.
Sanga cocked her head. “We can fix that, too.” When I stared up at her, she twirled her hair around a finger. “Maker made me as blonde as our good Queen Anora, but it’s too hard to keep it clean. We import a plant from Rivain that can stain hair as dark as you like.”
Bend, but don’t break. I couldn’t hide my tattoos without feeling like I was betraying my brother, my father, and my mother, but I could change my hair color. I nodded and rose, though it took more effort than I expected, and followed her back into the whores’ rooms.
Sanga recruited a nearby elf to get me washed and out of my armor while she ground bunches of a fragrant-smelling leaf into a dark brown paste. Once my hair was wet and clean, she began working the paste through from scalp to tip with a wooden comb. It hurt, but not as badly as my still-throbbing nose, so I kept silent while the elf girl stared at my face.
I was left to rest while the stain set, and Sanga walked off after ordering the girl not to let me move. “A-are you a Dalish?” she asked after several strained minutes of silence, and when I nodded blinked in shock. “Maker’s breath, my ma said you weren’t real!”
“Why wouldn’t I be real?”
She looked down at her hands. “You don’t seem like a savage, either.”
I was about to reply, but she was spared by Sanga, who had reappeared in the doorway. “Hush, Cirreth, and help me rinse this out. Zev’s in the lobby, nearly throwing chairs because someone told him this one was hurt worse than she actually is.” She shook her head at me as she poured water over my hair.
Zevran. Thank the Creators. I could ask him where he’d been the past few days if not here.
The flat-ear was rubbing my neck raw with a rough cloth when Zev practically burst through the door. “¿Tesora? ¡Andraste traicionada!i” He took my face in his hands and began inspecting me carefully. “That bastardo in the market said you were badly wounded. ¡Voy a matarle!ii” He slid his thumb along the split on my lip, and I hissed.
“I’m fine. Sanga’s amazing.”
He sniffed. “My Warden, have you been drinking their cider?” When I shrugged, he sighed. “You are going to feel terrible tomorrow.”
The flat-ear stepped out of the room and closed the door behind her, and Zevran tugged the towel from my head and froze.
“What?”
“Tu pelo es--” He shook his head. “Your hair.”
I pulled my forelock forward and inspected it as best I could. “You were the one who said I needed to stand out less. How does it look?”
Zevran spun me toward the wall, where there was a mirror, and I felt instantly foolish. My hair was a deep, warm brown now instead of the bright red I’d lived with all my life. Even my eyebrows had been altered, so now they blended in with my tattoo.
Creator’s sakes. My skin looked white behind all of this brown. “This makes my tattoo even more obvious, doesn’t it?”
“No, no.” Zevran looked at me in the mirror. “It brings out those lovely eyes of yours, if anything.”
I ran my fingers along my inkless cheeks. “I had no idea I was so pale.” Then again, I could count the number of times I’d seen my reflection in anything except a brook on my fingers. I’d made a habit of avoiding mirrors since leaving my clan, actually.
My eyes caught movement, and I watched Zev open his mouth, close it, and then open it again. “Come. We should get you in bed before the pain returns.”
While I fumbled back into my armor, he rebraided my hair for me, all the while staring at my eyes.
Chapter Forty-Six: I’m Not Respectable and Never Sensible, I’ve Been Incredible, So Damned Irascible, and I Like the Things I Do So Hooray For Me... and Fuck You! (Bad Religion)
CAERWYN
By then I should’ve known that there’d be more we had to do before we could do the more we already had to do before we could do the--Curse it! We couldn’t go look for the orange-haired alas’len’s wife until we’d dealt with the politics enough that there’d be a city left when we came back.
I’d proven myself to Harrowmont by doing the, well, Proving, and did the same for the alas’len prince by telling him I’d keep an eye on what Harrowmont was up to. I wasn’t going to pick a side until I figured out which one of them was more likely to give me their troops if I helped make him king, so I had to make both of them trust me.
Luckily they both wanted me to do the same next step of doing more things for them: take out a gang of thugs and their leader that were terrorizing the city. The prince wanted me to plant papers on their leader that had something to do with lyrium and it’d be bad for Harrowmont and I just told him I’d do it. I could decide if I really would when the time came.
At least this part meant more fighting, even if it used up time I should’ve been spending on one of the other more tasks. We went to the part of the city called “Dust Town” because Oghren said he thought that was the likeliest place they’d be hiding, and on the way I tried to imagine a place dirtier than the rest of Alasan.
It was worse than I’d imagined. Rocks were falling from the ceiling. Here people really didn’t bother trying to keep clean, and there was no stone on the ground. I was so distracted by the dirt that at first I didn’t realize everyone was staring at me.
That wasn’t strange; I’d spent most of my time since leaving our clan being stared at. But this was different. Some of the alas’len were smiling.
I started asking for information about the Carta, and everyone was really helpful. They told me everything I wanted to know, plus things I didn’t. It started to make me uncomfortable.
“They’re being... nice,” I said to the orange-hai--Oghren.
He chuckled. “It’s your pretty face, duster. They think you’re one of ’em.”
“Why?”
Leliana shook her head. “Dwarves make those born without a caste mark their faces so everyone knows not to deal with them. It means you are unclean and... invisible.”
“It means I’m a warrior.” I pulled my hair away from my face--it’d grown annoyingly long since we’d left the keep--to show Oghren how much of it my vallaslin covered.
He shrugged, unimpressed. “Not down here it doesn’t.”
I narrowed my eyes at him, then looked around at the tattooed alas’len in disgust. “It means it everywhere.”
When Oghren waved his hand dismissively, I walked away. At least I didn’t need him in Dust Town since everyone was so annoyingly helpful. We got the location from a woman with useless legs and a finger bone from a man with an apparently useless sword.
I tried sliding the bone into the slot in the door, but nothing happened. I rolled my eyes and sighed in frustration. Typical. It was probably time for another more. But Sten walked up to it and made that weird sort of grunt of his. Without saying anything, he picked up one of the larger chunks of rock that’d fallen from the ceiling and started hammering it against the door with a force that only a qunari could manage.
Oghren crossed his arms. “Heh. You half-brained slab of slate. That’s a dwarven door.”
Sten didn’t even bother looking back at him. “All doors open eventually.”
“Sure. You just keep trying. Maybe they’ll think you’re knocking and open it up all nice-like.”
I was skeptical too, but when Sten’d made a noticeable dent in the metal, the door opened, and he was practically yanked into the room. I had just enough time to wonder what sodding monstrosity could pull a qunari through a door when Oghren’d led the charge into the room.
We were met by at least half a dozen alas’len, another qunari--which I assumed was what’d pulled Sten through the door--and a flat-eared mage. I sliced through the gut of my obvious first choice, and in the space of a few seconds weapons were clashing and blood was everywhere.
When all of the thugs were down, Oghren tried to shut the door behind us and gave Sten an annoyed look when it wouldn’t close properly. He gave up, and I took a moment to scavenge the bodies for gold. We’d need it for supplies, wouldn’t we?
Tesni might've called me bloodthirsty if she'd been there, but cutting through that gang made me feel the best I had since we'd left the keep. Soon I was laughing in their faces while Leliana taunted them, Sten bellowed his battle shouts, Oghren frothed at the mouth, and Chat'len snarled and growled.
By the time we'd reached their leader we were all covered in blood and the fur around Chat'len's jaws was stained red. This didn’t seem to intimidate the alas’len leader at all, though.
"Pretty face," she said to me as we walked up to her, giving me a look I didn't like. "Too bad it won't stay that way."
I snorted. "Pretty cocky." I held up my blood-coated blades for emphasis.
"You'll pay for their deaths a hundred times over." She turned to her guards. "Leave the pretty one for me. Kill the rest!"
She should've picked better guards; they weren't much tougher than the rest of her gang, and by that point we’d gotten pretty good at dodging traps--the gang seemed to have an obsession with exploding barrels--and keeping the stealthier alas’len from sneaking up on us.
Then I was fighting her one-on-one. Her skill with knives was impressive; I hadn’t thought that someone so short and stocky could be so fast. That caught me off-guard enough at first that she nearly sunk one of her daggers into my shoulder before I spun away at the last minute. She put a cut into the leather all the same.
It took a lot of sharp maneuvering and speed on my part and Leliana, Sten, Chat’len, and Oghren all holding off the rest of the alas’len, but I finally managed to knock her down with a kick to the chest. She only had a chance to get back up onto her knees before I had the point of my knife at her throat.
“Nice moves,” she said with a smirk.
“Not bad yourself.”
I thought about telling her to take whatever guards she might have left and get out. What’d it matter as long as Harrowmont or Bhelen could say she was gone? I didn’t give care about what’d she’d done to the alas’len. I didn’t care about politics or power or whether their sodding city crumbled into the dirt.
But I did care about stopping the Blight. I did care about killing the archdemon. I thought of Bhelen and his promise to get me troops. He hadn’t talked about an Assembly or backing me. He’d just told me he’d do it.
So I let the alas’len woman give me one last defiant look. Then I sliced open her neck, left her dead in the dirt, and threw the papers in a chest at the back of the room.
I wasn’t surprised when Harrowmont and Bhelen both wanted me to do more, but at least they wanted the same thing again, and it was something we were already going to do. I immediately agreed. Now they both trusted me. I was going to need that in the end.
No more wasting time. I gave everyone two hours to get supplies, and then we met at the entrance to the Deep Roads.
"Fine," I said, shouldering my pack. "Let's get this over with."
iTesora? Andraste traicionada!: Darling? Betrayed Andraste!
iiVoy a matarle!: I'm going to kill him.
You are going to feel terrible tomorrow.
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And I feel so sorry for Zevran. He really gets to work for this one, and she doesn't even realise he has that kind of feelings for her.
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I feel really awful for him, too. I will not lie. Writing the last chapter made me feel guilty. >>
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I give him two more chapters.
Tops.
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Also that manip? Omfg give me your skills like now.
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And yes, Shimmy's far too good with mods+'shop.
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Chapter 46's title is my all-time fave.
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okay, i do want to know where the heck zev was during all this - it's not like him to be missing like that.
and caerwyn, onoes, the deep roads. i am proud of 'alas'len'. clever boy. ;D i hope he doesn't lose his mind under all the rock.
sick b is sick. morphine-induced not-making-sense-ness may ensue. you have been warned. XD
yay stories!
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Caerwyn is already tired of the rock and wants to go home. He's mad at me for not letting him.
Sick?! D: Feel better!
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