WHO: Gwenaƫlle Vauquelin + assorted. WHAT: Sad elfblooded in snow. WHEN: Early Harvestmere. WHERE: Skyhold. NOTES: References to death; likely also to infidelity, substance abuse, general mental instability. Starters in the comments.
There are a few visits that Gwenaƫlle has to make - some will be easier than others. Some of them, probably including this one, might be better accomplished some other way; some way that involves less 'leaving her room'. Less 'interacting with other people'. It isn't consideration or manners that drives her to handle it another way, but rather the desire that it be dealt with quickly and finished -
Not dragged out in discussions delivered in runners, but swiftly put to bed.
Maybe she's presuming, she thinks, letting herself into the rotunda and looking about to find its usual occupant. Maybe he won't care to question her and it will prove so swift it could have been done the other way without any inconvenience, and she'll just feel stupid and presumptuous for thinking that what drives her will interest anyone else at all.
No one accompanies her, this time. The maid who has replaced Guenievre has not replaced her in all things; does not shadow Gwenaƫlle so dedicatedly as her predecessor had. Funny, then, that finally she looks as if she might actually be in need of someone at her elbow, so unusually still, holding herself in the careful way of someone wounded.
A letter would have sufficed here, too, she thinks, but although Gwenaƫlle is less starved for kindness than she once was she hasn't yet grown accustomed enough to take it for granted; her instinct is to clutch greedily what's there in the expectation that it won't always be, take what she can until it's taken away, and it's too tempting to follow Cassandra's thoughtfulness back to its source and see if there might be more for her where that came from. She doesn't think of it in so many words, only -
- only doesn't question the impulse, so she doesn't have to.
If the wan face that appears in Cassandra's doorway is not familiar, the mellifluous voice that belongs to it is more distinct; "Seeker Pentaghast, I'm sorry to interrupt you again--"
She arranges something like a smile; it doesn't quite work.
"I only wanted to - apologise for the first interruption."
The voice is familiar, but where, exactly, she has heard it before is less easy to pin down. Cassandra looks up, eyebrows drawing down in confusion at the unfamiliar young woman peeking into her office. Interrupt her again? Who is this? Certainly she has never seen her before, which means she could not possibly have interrupted anything ever before. She's just opened her mouth to say so, to perhaps suggest, none too subtly, that perhaps she has the wrong Seeker in mind, when it clicks, and she cuts herself off just in time.
"Oh," she says instead. "Lady - Lady Vauquelin. The...poet." She nods, expression morphing from confusion and faint annoyance to something more like warm interest. "Of course. It is no interruption at all."
It was a great deal easier to feign something closer to usual composure with the distance of an entire nation and the crystals between them; Gwenaƫlle tries to look wry instead of just drawn and almost gets there, coming properly into the room when Cassandra's reception of her shifts in tone.
Though she isn't sure she has much more to say than what she's already said, so -
"It wasn't - very appropriate," she says, tucking loose hair behind her (round, disappointing) ears and taking in the office itself with some evident curiosity. "It was very kind of you to be so patient."
Young enough that she can't say, for all it would've amused her if she could, old in answer to that question; the gap between them is slightly less than a decade. Even under strain, though, she warms a little - visibly - at the question.
"Well and well-occupied in the forge." A beat; "I don't think I gave you his name - Lord Alexander Luthor, the Free Marcher smith that arrived not long ago. Yngvi, from the Boneflayers, recommended him to me when I was looking for someone to make a jointed dragon for Kieran."
Of whom she is excessively fond.
('An associate of Asher Hardie's Boneflayers' is not the first impression Gwenaƫlle is likely to give, you know, anyone at first glance. Strange bedfellows.)
Happily for Gwen, Cassandra has no opinion of the Boneflayers, either good or bad. She hums noncommittally, noting with satisfaction the positive effect the subject has on Gwen. Wanting to talk about one's (possible) future spouse is, she can say with some confidence, a good sign.
"I do not know him, I am afraid," she says, and tilts her head in thought as something occurs to her. "A lord and a smith? He's not a dwarf, is he?"
Not that there's anything wrong with that. With dwarves, in general. Or with noble human women becoming fond of them.
"No," she says, although she feels compelled to add a moment later, "though he isn't very tall."
It's just a trace of her humour, a flicker of something like a light behind a shutter, but not nothing for all that in a better mood she'd probably have expounded on this theme. Instead, she settles on, "No, but he did learn from them in Orzammar, before he inherited his title. The previous Lord Luthor, I think, died in the Blight."
An unpleasant business, but, also: Gwenaƫlle can be forgiven for a moment's solemnity on such a topic, and hide her own griefs beneath it.
A sleight of hand played with her own heart; she can never quite disguise her feelings, but she has deftly learned, instead, to disguise their causes. To seem aloof and not afraid, to be sad for this reason and not that one - to be underestimated, hiding her ability to turn eyes this way instead of that behind her known ineptness with the Game. To hide herself underneath the expectations of her.
It's an exhausting knife-edge to dance upon, and the most fascinatingly appealing thing about Lord Luthor is the idea that perhaps, actually, she wouldn't have to. Not with him.
"He's a great believer in what you're doing here."
"I am sorry to hear that," Cassandra says, and though the words may be rote, the sentiment behind them is genuine. Especially given Gwen's own evident grief - which does not make much sense on its face, given that the Blight is ten years past, and she does not even seem certain of the manner of the older man's death. A secondhand grief, then, passed on from her husband-to-be. "They must have been very close."
But on to lighter subjects. Cassandra lets herself smile. "Is he? It is good to know we have such support, from any quarter. I suppose that is why he is here? To lend his support?" Unless, of course, he had been drawn here by love of Gwen herself. How romantic.
Leaving behind the subject of anyone's parents dying - she can't be said to brighten in any lingering way, but there's another of those flickers of what must, when sustained, be a rather pleasing countenance. If Cassandra wants her very own love story to play out before her, she could do for worse heroines than a pretty, pensive thing like Gwenaƫlle.
"Yes, that's right. My work brought him here - he read my editorials, where I talked about what the Inquisition still needed, and saw a space to contribute." Loyally, "He's a very skilled craftsman."
Not quite love for her, but there's still something about it having been her words and her ideas that had caught his attention and brought him to the Inquisition. Certainly she'd been pleased with herself for it before she'd deeply considered being pleased by anything else in him; she'd written to anyone who cared to hear about her success, that her work wasn't pointless.
Cassandra nods, and though she would not recognize it in so many words, perhaps, she is pleased with the story. If it was not love for Gwen that brought Lord Alexander to Skyhold, it was, perhaps, something just as good, if not better. Respect for her, and honor, and a desire to put his own hands to work in the service of righteousness.
"In that case, we are very lucky to have you both here," she says, with satisfaction. "The Inquisition is lucky to have you."
Probably for the best that in the service of righteousness isn't something said aloud; what Gwenaƫlle's face would do in trying to apply such a phrase to Lex would probably not be the most reassuring to Cassandra regarding either her character or his.
But it doesn't happen, so that's all fine. They can continue to exist in slightly more idealised form - she would enjoy that, if she realised, for its concept. For the idea of a narrative version of herself that could be polished and tweaked in someone else's eyes; fitting for a young woman who so often examines her life through the lens of narrative tableaux. Who remembers everything, later, as she might a story.
"It's all worked out," she says, ignoring the way the words feel like digging her thumb into her own wounds. "I didn't imagine, when I first arrived. But it makes me optimistic for everything else."
It was truer a few weeks ago, but it's still -
She's found a place for herself, here, and she has to believe that they'll succeed.
Cassandra tilts her head, curious. There's something here, something Gwen isn't saying.
"You had reason to think it would not?" she asks, gently, trying not to pry. "If your reception at Skyhold was less than welcoming, I am sorry to hear it. Or did you simply mean that this was unanticipated?"
This, of course, being the great and wonderful romance that Gwen is lucky enough to be living out as they speak.
She's momentarily stymied; Skyhold was not, she can admit in retrospect, unwelcoming to her. Morrigan had been one of the first people she met here and is easily now one of the most important to her. Lex was unexpected in that how could she possibly have anticipated him, but -
She orders her thoughts, carefully. Tries not to think about her mother. Either of them.
"I didn't choose to come," she says, finally, fidgeting with the edge of her neckline nearest where the scars from the rage demon's claws become visible. (Beneath the fabric, they are extensive; winding long around her torso and scraping ugly down the back of her thigh.) "I spent the entire walk it took my lord to carry me from my bed to the carriage arguing that I shouldn't be sent away, that if you discovered what to do about the anchor-shards it could be sent to us, that I would have nothing useful to do and I would be all alone, that none of you would have time to bother with me and I might as well be at home if everything was so terrible, that it was all because of my last carriage journey ending in flames so what if I died going to Skyhold, then he would be sorry -"
Her tone shifts, halfway through that; a little self-mocking. She'd been so desperately, terribly afraid.
"He said he was sorry. He kissed my hair and he put me in the carriage and I went. Anders healed my wounds, when I arrived, so I wasn't bedridden any more, and..."
An awkward, lop-sided shrug.
"It wasn't unwelcoming and I haven't been useless and I wouldn't have ever met Alexander in Orlais."
Cassandra's gaze drops briefly down to Gwen's hand when she mentions the shard; strange, how very common the sight had become. She had noticed it, of course, but barely thought anything of it; this was clearly not one of the more dangerous, unknown rifters.
"I see," she says quietly. "I am sorry. It must have been very frightening." It has been some time since she gave much thought to the shards, beyond the risks they posed and their potential uses. Evelyn's had pained her in the beginning, that she knows...but what must it be like, to find one's hand suddenly a weapon - or a potential death sentence?
She tries her best to look reassuring, not to let her darker thoughts show in her expression. "I am glad that you have thrived here, despite your bad beginning."
There's some frustrating irony in the fact that her shard now produces a shield; it's hard to be grateful for something to protect her coming from the thing that's put her in danger in the first place. (And it didn't work, it wasn't enough - it didn't save Guenievre, and so what's the point of it? Nothing, she thinks.)
"I'm very proud," she says, after a moment, "of what I've done here."
It's oddly abstract; she can't quite connect words to feelings, but it is, nevertheless, indefinably something true. Just - something true that's very far away from her, now, when other feelings are so much closer and heavier. Eventually, it will be true in a way she can touch, again, and she shouldn't forget in the meantime, probably.
Maybe Guenievre was proud of her, too. Maybe Annegret would have been. Look, she wants to be able to say - look at all the things I've done, Mother. Maybe not the way she should have, but would the girl who'd done everything the way Annegret had wanted her to be sitting here making conversation about her courtship with the Cassandra Pentaghast?
She doesn't see any of those she fell short of sitting here. So, no.
(Another time, she'd probably linger in her smugness for a little bit-- but those bigger, heavier feelings are tiring, and we're all spared that for today.)
"One of your Seekers is my cousin, actually," after a slight pause. "Aleron Darton. Well; his wife was my cousin, Mirielle, but we decided to keep him. I haven't seen him much, I assume he's very busy, but he's always been very kind to me."
"You should be," Cassandra says loyally. Not that she still has a very clear idea of what it is, exactly, that Gwen does - apart from write about the Inquisition occasionally - but she's not about to discourage pride in one's good work, and any contribution to the Inquisition should be celebrated.
She brightens at the mention of Aleron, smiling fondly. "Of course! Aleron is a dear friend. He is very busy, as are we all, but he is a very gentle man. I was...very sorry to hear of his wife, of course. Your cousin. I understand she made him very happy."
morrigan ( + kieran ) ; and if you were my little girl
Morrigan is the last of her list, by design; she doesn't know what she wants to say on it so when she finds her she says nothing, the awful white of her speaking volumes without explanation, sits abruptly at her feet and lays her head in her lap and holds herself terribly, terribly still. Morrigan is, she thinks, the only person she can imagine explaining herself to on purpose - but she doesn't want to, doesn't know how to, can't find words that don't feel wrong and hurtful and petulant and undeserved, not hers to grieve when she's all that's left and look.
Only look at all that's left.
She leaves coming to Morrigan til last because she doesn't want to have to leave again, just hide herself in the witch's skirts and see if this is what safe feels like, after all.
Grieving isn't something Morrigan can say she has a particular talent at. If there was grieving to be done then she always did it alone and after, sometimes years after the fact; her own girlhood and how it had been throttled, pressed down into a bog until the muck and mire got under her and into her mouth, up her nose, through the cuts in her feet and her fingers from the mirror that shattered at a mother's hand. She never mourned Flemeth, didn't rejoice the way some might have expected her to; you don't dance when you slip free of the noose, you merely breathe and find yourself strangely thankful for that breath but never quite so certain of each one that comes after for a long time.
But she's reminded so much of Kieran, the terrible nightmares that come with lyrium (that come with her, with one night that saved three skins and were her ransom if she wishes to be terrible. It was a price, and nothing comes free, not even for her, she knows that now). Her hands are gentle when they cradle Gwenaelle's head, brushing through her hair with same soft noises she's uttered in the dark for ten years now to calm a growing boy. Always gentling some wild thing - it isn't lost on her that so many could say the same about her, about how Kieran has done the same - but grief does strange things, she's seen that in ten years so she won't rush her. Allows her to be small in here, as if this is the whole world. As if Morrigan's will alone could bend the world upon itself to make it so.
(If only, she thinks sometimes, if only. How much simpler it would be to keep so much safe in a smaller world but safe is a lie, and Morrigan knows that sure as she knows Flemeth has a part to play in this chaos before it is at an end.)
"Gwenaelle," she murmurs in her low voice, "what do you wish of me?" A request not lightly granted but here it is, offered freely.
The fabric of Morrigan's skirts under her cheek dampen and she hitches a breath that trembles, hates herself fiercely in that moment for weaknesses she's never been able to control the way others seem to do so effortlessly. Always behind, always a little bit less - never what she was supposed to be, not for any of them. Not the elven child that wouldn't have been taken from her mother; not the composed heir that could advance past where her stepmother's illnesses had kept her. Not the sweet thing that would have looked past her father's sins and been glad for his affection -
Just this, too sharp and too frank and too unhappy to please anyone at all.
Stroking her fingers through Gwenaelle's hair, she sighs quiet enough the air doesn't dare to be disturbed by it. This part she can do, quiet noises until the girl (in this moment she is a girl, not a young woman, because there is a chance to be a girl when someone else allows it, Morrigan knows that keenly through the lack of what she had herself) can find her knees to sit up with her. Morrigan knows her son, and when Gwenaelle has no suggestion, she raises her voice just enough that he might know he's wanted in here too.
"Kieran?" The door opens, her son hesitating, hovering, and she extends a hand to help him decide to come in with a blanket streaming behind him like a sail. He curls by Gwenaelle, tucks himself next to her so that some of the blanket is draped around her too. "Will you sit with Lady Gwenaelle while I make tea? Look after her for me?"
"Of course mother," he replies in a voice that's more solemn than usual where one of his very favourites is involved but she's never seemed so-- well he doesn't know what the word is, he's only ten, it just feels-- "jagged," is what he murmurs, then tucks himself against her while Morrigan extracts herself to make tea. (A benefit of magic; boil water in a moment, you always have herbs at the ready, you know what is needed at what time. This isn't a moment for wine either.)
Tea is better. Their company is better; Gwenaƫlle rests her cheek against Kieran's hair and breathes out, supposes that jagged is precisely how she feels right now. Like a part of her she didn't know she needed was cut haphazardly away from her, withou care for the wound, or how she's to bind it. What does she do? How does she grieve a loss that isn't supposed to be hers?
"I'm terrible company," she apologises quietly. It feels like she's finally stopped holding her breath, even if it isn't quite the release she needs.
With one small hand, Kieran strokes Gwenaelle's hair, makes a quiet noise like he might to a wounded bird - is that comparison so wrong in his head? He feels like one when he spreads his blanketed arms to rearrange the blankets, tucked close because she's hurting, and when his mother was hurting because the spymaster was hurting, Gwenaelle was always there.
Water boils where Morrigan is, the quiet rustling of herbs in a jar before she returns soon enough with three cups. Not the tea they drink in Orlais, not even in Ferelden unless they live on the fringes and know enough about what herbs to pick and when. She settles back where she was, sets the tray down and her hands are warm when she cups Gwenaelle's face.
"You are not," she says firmly. "You lost someone. It hurts. Drink some tea, take a breath. You need not even think if you do not wish to here, you may say whatever you wish and know it will not leave this room."
She wishes she could just blurt it out. Say it as easily as it sounded like Alistair did, or be so - just to not trip always on the words, for it not to stick in her throat like she's choking on it. Trust it will not leave this room and have that be enough, not have to fight with herself, have to bargain and rationalise and persuade herself.
It's terrifying how much she does trust Morrigan, and still it won't come naturally.
With careful, conscious deliberateness, she says, "She was my mama," cutting her gaze away before she can see the words land.
Secrets spill into Morrigan's lap, and she is reminded of Alistair too. It had been easier to joke with him because it had been Alistair (to ask if he had wanted her sympathies or some such, and she almost chokes on her tea, sets the cup down) when Fiona being elven had been--
Well she was Grand-Enchanter, a former Warden. So many other complicated things all wrapped up in there with Kieran the thing they danced about when he had told her, when if there was something she and Alistair shared long before a child then it was the pain of a childhood you wouldn't wish upon an animal. Unwanted and moved passed about for him, wanted only so much for what she might be in the end for her.
Much more makes sense. A piece slots into place that she thinks would cut them both if handled wrong but when has she been afraid of a dangerous thing or a sharp truth? Kieran's head jerks up, Alistair's face not hers because she's seen Alistair trying to hold himself together in the face of grief and loss on the road to Lothering. Quiet little offers of I'm sorry murmured to her with a beseeching look to his own mother, because mothers have a magic all their own, don't they?
"Gwenaelle," she says when she has her voice, when she knows she must be careful as she would with a wolf hunting in a cold hard winter, with a viper coiled to strike, a thing that might lash out and hurt them both but hurt itself worse because she has been that aching thing for so many other reasons. "I am so sorry. To lose her in such a way-- I cannot--"
And that is the problem, she thinks distantly, that she cannot, that motherhood is sometimes such a snare. That it has been for them both in different ways.
"The woman you spoke of before..in the eyes of all the world she was your mother as she was your father's lady wife. And she was your mother, I will not take that from you. But this loss...tis not one you can grieve. Nor one you can acknowledge outwith many walls." I will keep it safe for you, she thinks. Same as any thing ever said between them though this hangs more heavily when the damage it could do is so much greater for one young woman, when there are so many that would use it as a knife in her back or to her throat, to see her left with nothing at all in the world. The hearts of men and the hearts of the Court are ugly bitter things after all.
No, she can't. It can't be hers, and - it isn't, not really, the awful, hollowness in her when she says, so bitter,
"All I ever did for my mothers was watch them die."
A disappointment to Annegret, a chain that bound Guenievre, and loved best by a man she doesn't think she has it in her to ever forgive for her existence. All she did and all she can do - there is nothing else, not any more. Annegret and Guenievre are gone, and she can't even allow herself to mourn for the one. She can't be this, not balanced on this knife's edge.
Annegret wouldn't let her hold her hand, at the end. Guenievre had never been allowed to want. Gwenaƫlle, alone, wraps her hands around her elbows and doesn't realise she's rocking herself, self-contained in the way she soothes, too accustomed to having to be.
"And they didn't do that for me to ruin it all like this," softer. With her own weakness, with griefs that they had borne with the stoicism she's never mastered.
A rustle of fabric and Morrigan is moving to sit down by her instead, because it's easier that way. Because she isn't what so many might think of her - an advisor in name, a lady in name, titles others have stuck to her same as the Chantry or their ilk would place apostate upon her shoulders too. To pull both Gwenaelle and Kieran in close to her, to lay her cheek upon Gwenaelle's hair and curl her hand about her shoulder.
A thing she cannot recall having done to her but there are a great many things she's learned these past ten years, and thought herself better for having learned them.
"You did not," she tells her as fiercely as she can without it being too much with her gathered close. "A mother--" The words catch in her throat when she looks from Gwenaelle to Kieran and back again, the way they have before, they way they threatened to when Pel came to ask questions Morrigan felt barely qualified to answer. It had been easier with Zevran when she knew more of his pains, when they needn't tiptoe about them so much.
"A mother prepares her child for the world as best they can, and this world is a cruel one. It will take and take till there is naught left." Some mothers, she thinks, will devour you whole as well, and that isn't true only of mothers in swamps who live in huts; Orlais is just as capable of producing bloodthirsty mothers albeit without the magic capable to assume command of their daughters so neatly. "You will ruin nothing. Outside this room and your own, you were attacked. No matter whom you travelled with, you were attacked and you were hurt. Someone with whom you shared confidences with was taken from you by those who would have taken your life as well."
And because she is honest with Kieran too, about dangers. "I carried my heart in my throat in the Court each time you were but a well-spoken lad, naught to do with me for your own safety."
"I know mother." Is that her in his voice or is it the thing that nestles somewhere deep within that can look up with such solemn eyes. "The road can be very scary, but you aren't alone."
"The archer pointed his bow at me," she recalls - details that had seemed so unimportant when her hands were red with her mother's blood, things that had registered without sinking in until much, much later. "Alexander threw a knife."
And then he - wasn't pointing a bow at her any more.
If Guenievre hadn't been her mother, the experience of being so deliberately targeted for their weakness would have almost certainly been sufficiently distressing for anyone. She remembers in an abstract and strange way that she fought it when he dragged her away, that he had been inexorable in doing so regardless; the memories are stark but disjointed, oversaturated and impossible to entirely decipher. She couldn't be sure in what order it all happened, and not only because it was so swiftly done.
They are memories she could do without, but - what else would she have of her, if not this?
The slow, incremental way that she relaxes against Morrigan and Kieran both as she sifts through those recollections to parse them and contextualise that with Morrigan's words is telling in itself; only half-tame, easing like a cat pretending not to slink closer so as not to be banished upon noticing. She leans in like she's aware of how strangely starved for it she is, conscious of the lack and cautious to take 'too much' of what's offered.
"Her real children died in Halamshiral," she says, means, my sisters. "Celene killed them. There's only me of her left." And she doesn't feel like anything like enough, whatever anyone says--
"They wanted to kill you. He stopped them." Kieran speaks quietly, raised on stories of the Fifth Blight as well as so many histories and other lessons to prepare a lad, fighting his face because his bottom lip isn't staying still (what would uncle Alistair or Zevran say, or aunt Leliana?) but he doesn't like thinking about people wanting to hurt her. Not people wanting to hurt anyone really but certainly not someone who always takes him places and shares jokes with him, makes him smile and laugh, and doesn't treat him like he's just a child.
Whatever other feelings Morrigan might have about Lord Luthor in the way any woman might have about a strange young man entering the life of a yong woman they care about when they know too much about men, she can say this in his favour, even if he might never hear it. "I am glad that he was there, I would be poorer for your loss."
In front of Kieran she cannot say some of what she wants to say. Because she's trying to keep him safe from the horrors of her own childhood, from the nightmares that chilled the very blood in her veins, that hurt her, that turned her to such a bitter biting creature as she was. When Gwenaelle does not need to be held so gently she will tell her the truths of the Witches of the Wilds, she thinks but she rests her forehead down against hers, a sign to listen well when such words are far too harsh to say.
"A child is flesh and blood, but not always that of your body." Am I your daughter mother, or did you steal me from a Chasind? In truth she knows in her heart that it's the former and twas only ever spiteful bitter comforts that she tried to find in distancing herself from stings and slaps in thinking of another mother who had a babe ripped from her once by a prowling creature she feared. "All this time she was with you, watched over you, kept your confidences. The world is a hungry thing but it cannot take the truth; she brought you into this world, that made you real and made you hers as much as she is yours, even now. What you do with that is up to you. You are your own person, Gwenaelle. You will always have choices."
Perhaps harder to see now than ever but when Morrigan snatched them from her mother's fingers leaving pieces of herself behind, she will be damned if she allows someone she cares for to lose sight of that if she can prevent it.
Thranduil had given her the little beast some weeks prior, upon his return from whatever exactly it was that involved stealing jewels from Orlesian noblewoman - she'd had a thousand other things to do and a great deal of uncertainty as to what exactly one did with an admittedly already housebroken and partly trained puppy. He'd been cared for by servants and occasionally the stables, and it's only when she's finally settled back in after her own jaunt that Gwenaƫlle gives the demanding little thing some of her time, softening almost against her will at the way he slinks under her hands and against her feet, presses his face to her and whines at her distress.
"Hardie," she tests, holding him up to her face. "Hardie." He's supposed to be a guard dog - when he grows, she supposes - so it seems fitting to name him after the last person to make her feel safe.
Which doesn't solve the problem of not really knowing what to do with a dog, although at least Hardie seems to know what to do with himself, mostly. Yngvi is asleep outside of her door when she pushes it open; she opens it carefully and leaves him a note so he knows where she is and doesn't worry. By now, she knows the swiftest routes around the castle - the least populated. It's easy to find her way down to where Cullen overworks, push the door open with her foot.
For more reasons than just the dog in her arms (perfectly capable, probably, of trotting at her heels), she doesn't blow in with the same carelessness as she has in the past.
"Commander?"
She's not untidy; her hair is braided, her dress is clean. But there's a dullness - a lack of something sharp and bright that was there before, as if some part of her has gone away somewhere behind her eyes.
"Lady Vauquellin." If he sounds surprised to see her, it's because he is surprised to see her. Surprised, but not upset. Though he can't help but notice the lack of exuberance about her today. The puppy is also new. "And guest." He'll get to that later.
Cullen has, since the last time she saw his office, gained a chair. Not a chair for himself. It sits in the corner, not covered in debris, and is a chair for a guest. For someone to sit quietly in and take comfort in the assurance that the Commander has the authority to throw anyone out of his office. It makes it an ideal place to hide, if one is so inclined. It's to this chair that he attempts to usher her once he clears his desk.
"His name is Hardie," she says, too caught off-guard by suddenly being moved to protest it and sitting in the chair before she quite knows why or what just happened. "You're Fereldan, you know things about dogs - I don't know anything about dogs."
The general care and feeding thereof she is picking up; and there are servants, it isn't as if Hardie's entirely reliant on her and her inconsistent schedule. But there are other things that need to be addressed, or attended to, or learned -
He's still small, which seems to her like a good time to make sure he can be taught who not to growl at because they're friends. (Or - more than friends, in particular cases she's thinking of.)
Cullen looks thoughtful when she tells him the dog's name. It's been a while, but the loss of a friend is not something a person just gets over. Cullen only knew the man briefly, and he still feels grief at the loss - not crippling, or even inhibiting, but it is there. If Gwen was close enough to the man to name her dog after him. Why now, though? No.
He kneels next to the chair, putting himself eye level with the puppy and removing one of his gloves to let it smell his bare skin. "They aren't overly complicated creatures. He's beautiful."
"Thranduil gave him to me." It occurs to her that she doesn't know if he knows who that is; elaborates a moment later, "The very big foreign elf."
(Which is probably not how he'd prefer to be described, though he might be prepared to be philosophical about it as it's certainly not the worst of all possible ways Gwenaƫlle, specifically, might have described him to someone.)
"He said it would make him feel better if I had a guard dog." Hardie, sniffing Cullen's hand with interest, moving cautiously after having already learned the lesson that his mistress's voluminous skirts could appear deceptively firm and prove to have nothing but air beneath them, does not look like he'll be replacing Yngvi at her door immediately. He does, however, have the promise of being a much larger dog fully grown. "I thought I should find out how to teach him who I don't need guarded from. While he's still little."
(If she just doesn't acknowledge or talk about the sad elephant in the room, maybe he won't notice. That's definitely how this works, and not desperately wishful thinking.)
The puppy's paws are, indeed, being inspected. He'll be large. Not mabari large, but more than large enough to be a problem if he's not properly trained. "The best thing you can do? Don't teach him to react only to the people who come to see you, teach him to react to your mood. If you feel safe, he should be calm. If you feel threatened, he should be defensive." A person could put Gwen at ease one day, and make her feel unsafe the next. A good guard dog should not automatically assume anyone is safe. Every interaction should be an assessment.
Asher could have helped her with all of this, if he were here. He knew about dogs, too, he had Bronson - he would have been who she'd gone to for help with her shard, too, instead of Alistair. Clinging to one grief to avoid another isn't really helping, but it's there, still, so why not? One after another.
It's hard not to think who might be next.
"How do I do that?" after a moment, scratching Hardie absently behind his ears. "He does learn well. He knows some things already - he's housebroken and he'll sit and stay and heel. And he answers to some foreign elf word, but I think he knows his name, too." Hƻ, the Sindarin word for dog; Gwenaƫlle, predictably, had discarded that immediately in favour of giving him a name that isn't some elf nonsense.
"Training dogs with other dogs helps. You can come with me the next time I take Puppy out." If she feels up to going outside. She looks awful. Truly. Not unattractive, but awful in a more thorough way. Deflated. Diminished. "Sit and stay and heel are all good. You should teach him to relieve himself on command, too. It'll probably be helpful down the line. Simple things. The closer you two become, the more easily he'll react to your moods."
Cullen still has one of those big clumsy looking paws in his hand, and he's rubbing along the pads, trying to keep Hardie calm. "What's happened, Gwen?" This isn't really about a dog, surely.
It's a reflex; she says it as instinctively and easily as Cullen might draw his sword at a threat, which is. Not an irrelevant comparison, when her shoulders draw in just a little at the question, like it is a threat, somehow. It isn't that she's afraid of him, or uncomfortable with him - it isn't him at all, only a learned response to something inside of her.
It takes her a moment to remember what Morrigan had said, and say, "I think I'm tired of traveling."
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solas ; you know what your mama went through
Not dragged out in discussions delivered in runners, but swiftly put to bed.
Maybe she's presuming, she thinks, letting herself into the rotunda and looking about to find its usual occupant. Maybe he won't care to question her and it will prove so swift it could have been done the other way without any inconvenience, and she'll just feel stupid and presumptuous for thinking that what drives her will interest anyone else at all.
No one accompanies her, this time. The maid who has replaced Guenievre has not replaced her in all things; does not shadow Gwenaƫlle so dedicatedly as her predecessor had. Funny, then, that finally she looks as if she might actually be in need of someone at her elbow, so unusually still, holding herself in the careful way of someone wounded.
"Solas?"
cassandra ; it's crazy what you do for a friend
- only doesn't question the impulse, so she doesn't have to.
If the wan face that appears in Cassandra's doorway is not familiar, the mellifluous voice that belongs to it is more distinct; "Seeker Pentaghast, I'm sorry to interrupt you again--"
She arranges something like a smile; it doesn't quite work.
"I only wanted to - apologise for the first interruption."
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"Oh," she says instead. "Lady - Lady Vauquelin. The...poet." She nods, expression morphing from confusion and faint annoyance to something more like warm interest. "Of course. It is no interruption at all."
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Though she isn't sure she has much more to say than what she's already said, so -
"It wasn't - very appropriate," she says, tucking loose hair behind her (round, disappointing) ears and taking in the office itself with some evident curiosity. "It was very kind of you to be so patient."
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She pauses, looking at the young woman curiously.
"How is your young man?"
She assumes he's young. Hopes he's young.
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"Well and well-occupied in the forge." A beat; "I don't think I gave you his name - Lord Alexander Luthor, the Free Marcher smith that arrived not long ago. Yngvi, from the Boneflayers, recommended him to me when I was looking for someone to make a jointed dragon for Kieran."
Of whom she is excessively fond.
('An associate of Asher Hardie's Boneflayers' is not the first impression Gwenaƫlle is likely to give, you know, anyone at first glance. Strange bedfellows.)
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"I do not know him, I am afraid," she says, and tilts her head in thought as something occurs to her. "A lord and a smith? He's not a dwarf, is he?"
Not that there's anything wrong with that. With dwarves, in general. Or with noble human women becoming fond of them.
Not that Cassandra would know.
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It's just a trace of her humour, a flicker of something like a light behind a shutter, but not nothing for all that in a better mood she'd probably have expounded on this theme. Instead, she settles on, "No, but he did learn from them in Orzammar, before he inherited his title. The previous Lord Luthor, I think, died in the Blight."
An unpleasant business, but, also: Gwenaƫlle can be forgiven for a moment's solemnity on such a topic, and hide her own griefs beneath it.
A sleight of hand played with her own heart; she can never quite disguise her feelings, but she has deftly learned, instead, to disguise their causes. To seem aloof and not afraid, to be sad for this reason and not that one - to be underestimated, hiding her ability to turn eyes this way instead of that behind her known ineptness with the Game. To hide herself underneath the expectations of her.
It's an exhausting knife-edge to dance upon, and the most fascinatingly appealing thing about Lord Luthor is the idea that perhaps, actually, she wouldn't have to. Not with him.
"He's a great believer in what you're doing here."
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But on to lighter subjects. Cassandra lets herself smile. "Is he? It is good to know we have such support, from any quarter. I suppose that is why he is here? To lend his support?" Unless, of course, he had been drawn here by love of Gwen herself. How romantic.
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"Yes, that's right. My work brought him here - he read my editorials, where I talked about what the Inquisition still needed, and saw a space to contribute." Loyally, "He's a very skilled craftsman."
Not quite love for her, but there's still something about it having been her words and her ideas that had caught his attention and brought him to the Inquisition. Certainly she'd been pleased with herself for it before she'd deeply considered being pleased by anything else in him; she'd written to anyone who cared to hear about her success, that her work wasn't pointless.
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"In that case, we are very lucky to have you both here," she says, with satisfaction. "The Inquisition is lucky to have you."
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But it doesn't happen, so that's all fine. They can continue to exist in slightly more idealised form - she would enjoy that, if she realised, for its concept. For the idea of a narrative version of herself that could be polished and tweaked in someone else's eyes; fitting for a young woman who so often examines her life through the lens of narrative tableaux. Who remembers everything, later, as she might a story.
"It's all worked out," she says, ignoring the way the words feel like digging her thumb into her own wounds. "I didn't imagine, when I first arrived. But it makes me optimistic for everything else."
It was truer a few weeks ago, but it's still -
She's found a place for herself, here, and she has to believe that they'll succeed.
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"You had reason to think it would not?" she asks, gently, trying not to pry. "If your reception at Skyhold was less than welcoming, I am sorry to hear it. Or did you simply mean that this was unanticipated?"
This, of course, being the great and wonderful romance that Gwen is lucky enough to be living out as they speak.
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She's momentarily stymied; Skyhold was not, she can admit in retrospect, unwelcoming to her. Morrigan had been one of the first people she met here and is easily now one of the most important to her. Lex was unexpected in that how could she possibly have anticipated him, but -
She orders her thoughts, carefully. Tries not to think about her mother. Either of them.
"I didn't choose to come," she says, finally, fidgeting with the edge of her neckline nearest where the scars from the rage demon's claws become visible. (Beneath the fabric, they are extensive; winding long around her torso and scraping ugly down the back of her thigh.) "I spent the entire walk it took my lord to carry me from my bed to the carriage arguing that I shouldn't be sent away, that if you discovered what to do about the anchor-shards it could be sent to us, that I would have nothing useful to do and I would be all alone, that none of you would have time to bother with me and I might as well be at home if everything was so terrible, that it was all because of my last carriage journey ending in flames so what if I died going to Skyhold, then he would be sorry -"
Her tone shifts, halfway through that; a little self-mocking. She'd been so desperately, terribly afraid.
"He said he was sorry. He kissed my hair and he put me in the carriage and I went. Anders healed my wounds, when I arrived, so I wasn't bedridden any more, and..."
An awkward, lop-sided shrug.
"It wasn't unwelcoming and I haven't been useless and I wouldn't have ever met Alexander in Orlais."
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"I see," she says quietly. "I am sorry. It must have been very frightening." It has been some time since she gave much thought to the shards, beyond the risks they posed and their potential uses. Evelyn's had pained her in the beginning, that she knows...but what must it be like, to find one's hand suddenly a weapon - or a potential death sentence?
She tries her best to look reassuring, not to let her darker thoughts show in her expression. "I am glad that you have thrived here, despite your bad beginning."
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"I'm very proud," she says, after a moment, "of what I've done here."
It's oddly abstract; she can't quite connect words to feelings, but it is, nevertheless, indefinably something true. Just - something true that's very far away from her, now, when other feelings are so much closer and heavier. Eventually, it will be true in a way she can touch, again, and she shouldn't forget in the meantime, probably.
Maybe Guenievre was proud of her, too. Maybe Annegret would have been. Look, she wants to be able to say - look at all the things I've done, Mother. Maybe not the way she should have, but would the girl who'd done everything the way Annegret had wanted her to be sitting here making conversation about her courtship with the Cassandra Pentaghast?
She doesn't see any of those she fell short of sitting here. So, no.
(Another time, she'd probably linger in her smugness for a little bit-- but those bigger, heavier feelings are tiring, and we're all spared that for today.)
"One of your Seekers is my cousin, actually," after a slight pause. "Aleron Darton. Well; his wife was my cousin, Mirielle, but we decided to keep him. I haven't seen him much, I assume he's very busy, but he's always been very kind to me."
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She brightens at the mention of Aleron, smiling fondly. "Of course! Aleron is a dear friend. He is very busy, as are we all, but he is a very gentle man. I was...very sorry to hear of his wife, of course. Your cousin. I understand she made him very happy."
morrigan ( + kieran ) ; and if you were my little girl
Only look at all that's left.
She leaves coming to Morrigan til last because she doesn't want to have to leave again, just hide herself in the witch's skirts and see if this is what safe feels like, after all.
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But she's reminded so much of Kieran, the terrible nightmares that come with lyrium (that come with her, with one night that saved three skins and were her ransom if she wishes to be terrible. It was a price, and nothing comes free, not even for her, she knows that now). Her hands are gentle when they cradle Gwenaelle's head, brushing through her hair with same soft noises she's uttered in the dark for ten years now to calm a growing boy. Always gentling some wild thing - it isn't lost on her that so many could say the same about her, about how Kieran has done the same - but grief does strange things, she's seen that in ten years so she won't rush her. Allows her to be small in here, as if this is the whole world. As if Morrigan's will alone could bend the world upon itself to make it so.
(If only, she thinks sometimes, if only. How much simpler it would be to keep so much safe in a smaller world but safe is a lie, and Morrigan knows that sure as she knows Flemeth has a part to play in this chaos before it is at an end.)
"Gwenaelle," she murmurs in her low voice, "what do you wish of me?" A request not lightly granted but here it is, offered freely.
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Just this, too sharp and too frank and too unhappy to please anyone at all.
"I just -"
She burrows in closer, shaking her head.
"I don't know."
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"Kieran?" The door opens, her son hesitating, hovering, and she extends a hand to help him decide to come in with a blanket streaming behind him like a sail. He curls by Gwenaelle, tucks himself next to her so that some of the blanket is draped around her too. "Will you sit with Lady Gwenaelle while I make tea? Look after her for me?"
"Of course mother," he replies in a voice that's more solemn than usual where one of his very favourites is involved but she's never seemed so-- well he doesn't know what the word is, he's only ten, it just feels-- "jagged," is what he murmurs, then tucks himself against her while Morrigan extracts herself to make tea. (A benefit of magic; boil water in a moment, you always have herbs at the ready, you know what is needed at what time. This isn't a moment for wine either.)
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Tea is better. Their company is better; Gwenaƫlle rests her cheek against Kieran's hair and breathes out, supposes that jagged is precisely how she feels right now. Like a part of her she didn't know she needed was cut haphazardly away from her, withou care for the wound, or how she's to bind it. What does she do? How does she grieve a loss that isn't supposed to be hers?
"I'm terrible company," she apologises quietly. It feels like she's finally stopped holding her breath, even if it isn't quite the release she needs.
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Water boils where Morrigan is, the quiet rustling of herbs in a jar before she returns soon enough with three cups. Not the tea they drink in Orlais, not even in Ferelden unless they live on the fringes and know enough about what herbs to pick and when. She settles back where she was, sets the tray down and her hands are warm when she cups Gwenaelle's face.
"You are not," she says firmly. "You lost someone. It hurts. Drink some tea, take a breath. You need not even think if you do not wish to here, you may say whatever you wish and know it will not leave this room."
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She wishes she could just blurt it out. Say it as easily as it sounded like Alistair did, or be so - just to not trip always on the words, for it not to stick in her throat like she's choking on it. Trust it will not leave this room and have that be enough, not have to fight with herself, have to bargain and rationalise and persuade herself.
It's terrifying how much she does trust Morrigan, and still it won't come naturally.
With careful, conscious deliberateness, she says, "She was my mama," cutting her gaze away before she can see the words land.
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Well she was Grand-Enchanter, a former Warden. So many other complicated things all wrapped up in there with Kieran the thing they danced about when he had told her, when if there was something she and Alistair shared long before a child then it was the pain of a childhood you wouldn't wish upon an animal. Unwanted and moved passed about for him, wanted only so much for what she might be in the end for her.
Much more makes sense. A piece slots into place that she thinks would cut them both if handled wrong but when has she been afraid of a dangerous thing or a sharp truth? Kieran's head jerks up, Alistair's face not hers because she's seen Alistair trying to hold himself together in the face of grief and loss on the road to Lothering. Quiet little offers of I'm sorry murmured to her with a beseeching look to his own mother, because mothers have a magic all their own, don't they?
"Gwenaelle," she says when she has her voice, when she knows she must be careful as she would with a wolf hunting in a cold hard winter, with a viper coiled to strike, a thing that might lash out and hurt them both but hurt itself worse because she has been that aching thing for so many other reasons. "I am so sorry. To lose her in such a way-- I cannot--"
And that is the problem, she thinks distantly, that she cannot, that motherhood is sometimes such a snare. That it has been for them both in different ways.
"The woman you spoke of before..in the eyes of all the world she was your mother as she was your father's lady wife. And she was your mother, I will not take that from you. But this loss...tis not one you can grieve. Nor one you can acknowledge outwith many walls." I will keep it safe for you, she thinks. Same as any thing ever said between them though this hangs more heavily when the damage it could do is so much greater for one young woman, when there are so many that would use it as a knife in her back or to her throat, to see her left with nothing at all in the world. The hearts of men and the hearts of the Court are ugly bitter things after all.
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"All I ever did for my mothers was watch them die."
A disappointment to Annegret, a chain that bound Guenievre, and loved best by a man she doesn't think she has it in her to ever forgive for her existence. All she did and all she can do - there is nothing else, not any more. Annegret and Guenievre are gone, and she can't even allow herself to mourn for the one. She can't be this, not balanced on this knife's edge.
Annegret wouldn't let her hold her hand, at the end. Guenievre had never been allowed to want. Gwenaƫlle, alone, wraps her hands around her elbows and doesn't realise she's rocking herself, self-contained in the way she soothes, too accustomed to having to be.
"And they didn't do that for me to ruin it all like this," softer. With her own weakness, with griefs that they had borne with the stoicism she's never mastered.
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A thing she cannot recall having done to her but there are a great many things she's learned these past ten years, and thought herself better for having learned them.
"You did not," she tells her as fiercely as she can without it being too much with her gathered close. "A mother--" The words catch in her throat when she looks from Gwenaelle to Kieran and back again, the way they have before, they way they threatened to when Pel came to ask questions Morrigan felt barely qualified to answer. It had been easier with Zevran when she knew more of his pains, when they needn't tiptoe about them so much.
"A mother prepares her child for the world as best they can, and this world is a cruel one. It will take and take till there is naught left." Some mothers, she thinks, will devour you whole as well, and that isn't true only of mothers in swamps who live in huts; Orlais is just as capable of producing bloodthirsty mothers albeit without the magic capable to assume command of their daughters so neatly. "You will ruin nothing. Outside this room and your own, you were attacked. No matter whom you travelled with, you were attacked and you were hurt. Someone with whom you shared confidences with was taken from you by those who would have taken your life as well."
And because she is honest with Kieran too, about dangers. "I carried my heart in my throat in the Court each time you were but a well-spoken lad, naught to do with me for your own safety."
"I know mother." Is that her in his voice or is it the thing that nestles somewhere deep within that can look up with such solemn eyes. "The road can be very scary, but you aren't alone."
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And then he - wasn't pointing a bow at her any more.
If Guenievre hadn't been her mother, the experience of being so deliberately targeted for their weakness would have almost certainly been sufficiently distressing for anyone. She remembers in an abstract and strange way that she fought it when he dragged her away, that he had been inexorable in doing so regardless; the memories are stark but disjointed, oversaturated and impossible to entirely decipher. She couldn't be sure in what order it all happened, and not only because it was so swiftly done.
They are memories she could do without, but - what else would she have of her, if not this?
The slow, incremental way that she relaxes against Morrigan and Kieran both as she sifts through those recollections to parse them and contextualise that with Morrigan's words is telling in itself; only half-tame, easing like a cat pretending not to slink closer so as not to be banished upon noticing. She leans in like she's aware of how strangely starved for it she is, conscious of the lack and cautious to take 'too much' of what's offered.
"Her real children died in Halamshiral," she says, means, my sisters. "Celene killed them. There's only me of her left." And she doesn't feel like anything like enough, whatever anyone says--
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Whatever other feelings Morrigan might have about Lord Luthor in the way any woman might have about a strange young man entering the life of a yong woman they care about when they know too much about men, she can say this in his favour, even if he might never hear it. "I am glad that he was there, I would be poorer for your loss."
In front of Kieran she cannot say some of what she wants to say. Because she's trying to keep him safe from the horrors of her own childhood, from the nightmares that chilled the very blood in her veins, that hurt her, that turned her to such a bitter biting creature as she was. When Gwenaelle does not need to be held so gently she will tell her the truths of the Witches of the Wilds, she thinks but she rests her forehead down against hers, a sign to listen well when such words are far too harsh to say.
"A child is flesh and blood, but not always that of your body." Am I your daughter mother, or did you steal me from a Chasind? In truth she knows in her heart that it's the former and twas only ever spiteful bitter comforts that she tried to find in distancing herself from stings and slaps in thinking of another mother who had a babe ripped from her once by a prowling creature she feared. "All this time she was with you, watched over you, kept your confidences. The world is a hungry thing but it cannot take the truth; she brought you into this world, that made you real and made you hers as much as she is yours, even now. What you do with that is up to you. You are your own person, Gwenaelle. You will always have choices."
Perhaps harder to see now than ever but when Morrigan snatched them from her mother's fingers leaving pieces of herself behind, she will be damned if she allows someone she cares for to lose sight of that if she can prevent it.
cullen ; i'd run away and hide with you
"Hardie," she tests, holding him up to her face. "Hardie." He's supposed to be a guard dog - when he grows, she supposes - so it seems fitting to name him after the last person to make her feel safe.
Which doesn't solve the problem of not really knowing what to do with a dog, although at least Hardie seems to know what to do with himself, mostly. Yngvi is asleep outside of her door when she pushes it open; she opens it carefully and leaves him a note so he knows where she is and doesn't worry. By now, she knows the swiftest routes around the castle - the least populated. It's easy to find her way down to where Cullen overworks, push the door open with her foot.
For more reasons than just the dog in her arms (perfectly capable, probably, of trotting at her heels), she doesn't blow in with the same carelessness as she has in the past.
"Commander?"
She's not untidy; her hair is braided, her dress is clean. But there's a dullness - a lack of something sharp and bright that was there before, as if some part of her has gone away somewhere behind her eyes.
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Cullen has, since the last time she saw his office, gained a chair. Not a chair for himself. It sits in the corner, not covered in debris, and is a chair for a guest. For someone to sit quietly in and take comfort in the assurance that the Commander has the authority to throw anyone out of his office. It makes it an ideal place to hide, if one is so inclined. It's to this chair that he attempts to usher her once he clears his desk.
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The general care and feeding thereof she is picking up; and there are servants, it isn't as if Hardie's entirely reliant on her and her inconsistent schedule. But there are other things that need to be addressed, or attended to, or learned -
He's still small, which seems to her like a good time to make sure he can be taught who not to growl at because they're friends. (Or - more than friends, in particular cases she's thinking of.)
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He kneels next to the chair, putting himself eye level with the puppy and removing one of his gloves to let it smell his bare skin. "They aren't overly complicated creatures. He's beautiful."
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(Which is probably not how he'd prefer to be described, though he might be prepared to be philosophical about it as it's certainly not the worst of all possible ways Gwenaƫlle, specifically, might have described him to someone.)
"He said it would make him feel better if I had a guard dog." Hardie, sniffing Cullen's hand with interest, moving cautiously after having already learned the lesson that his mistress's voluminous skirts could appear deceptively firm and prove to have nothing but air beneath them, does not look like he'll be replacing Yngvi at her door immediately. He does, however, have the promise of being a much larger dog fully grown. "I thought I should find out how to teach him who I don't need guarded from. While he's still little."
(If she just doesn't acknowledge or talk about the sad elephant in the room, maybe he won't notice. That's definitely how this works, and not desperately wishful thinking.)
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It's hard not to think who might be next.
"How do I do that?" after a moment, scratching Hardie absently behind his ears. "He does learn well. He knows some things already - he's housebroken and he'll sit and stay and heel. And he answers to some foreign elf word, but I think he knows his name, too." Hƻ, the Sindarin word for dog; Gwenaƫlle, predictably, had discarded that immediately in favour of giving him a name that isn't some elf nonsense.
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Cullen still has one of those big clumsy looking paws in his hand, and he's rubbing along the pads, trying to keep Hardie calm. "What's happened, Gwen?" This isn't really about a dog, surely.
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It's a reflex; she says it as instinctively and easily as Cullen might draw his sword at a threat, which is. Not an irrelevant comparison, when her shoulders draw in just a little at the question, like it is a threat, somehow. It isn't that she's afraid of him, or uncomfortable with him - it isn't him at all, only a learned response to something inside of her.
It takes her a moment to remember what Morrigan had said, and say, "I think I'm tired of traveling."
Someone seems to die every time she does it.