faderift | work it harder make it better do it faster makes us stronger

WHO: Galatea Lourdes & Simon Ashlock
WHAT: The bold and the dutiful.
WHEN: After the Tourney.
WHERE: Lake Celestine, Orlais
NOTES: I made it the cut text, Anna.

The end of the tourney doesn't mean Kirkwall again, immediately, for two members of the Inquisition: new orders send Galatea home (or something like it—everywhere in Orlais is home, and no where at all) along with one of the Templars in Chantry Relations, Ashlock. As guests of the Comte Necollier, they will be models for his artists' retreat—the subjects of a series of very impressive and inspirational portraits, intended to portray the Inquisition's agents in a suitably favourable (and heroic) light.

Galatea is, naturally, delighted to be thought of. She makes inane chatter all the way there, not lingering much on any topic of conversation that isn't repeatedly regaling Simon with the story of how at the tourney Bronach won her a life-size halla toy that she can even sit on because it's meant for Orlesian children, the well-fed kind, and she's both an elf and very small, and when you carry it on your shoulders it looks sort of real, kind of, and it's gone back to Kirkwall so it'll be waiting for her when they get back there, and—

(She rides behind him on his horse. It's just easier; experience has not yet made her a confident horsewoman in her own right. There is no escaping the good-natured chatter.)

The Comte has various prop supplies, when they do eventually arrive—shinier armor, various headpieces that don't obscure their pretty faces, useless but beautiful pieces of ornate weaponry. One of the artists persuades (...without much effort) Galatea to try getting up on Simon's shoulders, suggesting that perhaps she's scouting the distance, but it's her idea to—

“Can I have that bow?”

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"I need also your scarf, please," Galatea requests, politely, of one of the artists nearest them; it is an outrageous red, and when he seems reluctant to hand it over to an elf (who has yet to disabuse anyone present of their assumption she is a tamed wild wood elf, presumably saved by the love of the Maker from her hedonitic forest ways), offers the persuasive argument: "It's the fashion, for Inquisition archers."

Well; for one of them. An elf one. From another world entirely.

Galatea thinks he might get a kick out of setting a trend in Orlais; humans slavishly copying his look. She waits until she's safely upon Simon's shoulders to wind it around her braids - not over her eye like Iorveth, not when half the point of this exercise is her pretty face (his arse may be the other half, if she's any judge of men), but wound around her hair with enough artfully uncovered to forestall objections.

However, when she says, "Can I have an arrow?" there are demurring murmurs and a not unkind, "It can be painted in, after," which is disappointing.

"I wouldn't have shot anyone," she mutters, for Simon's benefit, "I don't even know how to arch."

Simon is acquainted with few Inquisition archers, and fewer elven ones, and has never spoken to Iorveth, despite his otherwise-notable affinity for elves missing eyes. If Gala said it was the fashion for Inquisition archers to hop on one leg while aiming, Simon wouldn't see fit to question it. How would he know?

He can, however, see the objection to including an actual arrow in the posing, though as the one person in the room not potentially in the path of it, he's free to be amused. He doesn't hide the grin this time. "I believe you," he assures her, "but to be fair, I think that makes it more of a problem, not less."

Something is not quite adding up, though, and he is pondering how best to phrase it. "How is it that you don't know, though? I thought--and I could be wrong, of course--that everyone in your clan would have...some sort of training in it, or experience, or..."

Why he would have assumed this, he cannot articulate, except that everyone knows the Dalish have bows with which to shoot at unsuspecting shemlen from the underbrush. All of them, presumably. It's just A Thing.

In an undertone not intended to carry further than Simon's own ears, she explains (a little too merrily), “I'm from Halamshiral, I used to work for the Chantry before the Inquisition,” so breezy, “these tattoos mean 'all elf girls look the same to gullible shems'.”

Which begs the question of why exactly a Chantry-affiliated city elf needed to reinvent herself quite so thoroughly on the road to the Inquisition, but this perhaps doesn't seem like a good moment to get the detailed answer. (Perhaps she should reconsider offering that information to a Templar she is currently sitting on, but she likes Simon well enough; to her discerning eye, he seems like a good sort, and unlikely to tumble her down and start throwing his biceps about the place over a small mystery like that.)

“All children look the same if they're dirty enough. And one of them was an elf, so I could move them quietly, if we looked like refugees.”

Ah.

"Oh," he says, clearly taken aback by her unDalishness, but faltering only slightly. It does not occur to him to think of this as the same nature of offense as, say, wearing the robes of a Chantry priest without ordination (though it does ping a faint what would Nari think? alarm in the back of his mind.) It's not sacrilege; sacrilege is reserved for pagans, and Gala is obviously one of the Maker's flock.

That realization makes him feel warmer toward her out of simple Andrastian kinship, even if she has just more or less told him that 'gullible' is written on the ceiling and made him look, but it fades as quickly as it had come as he turns that confession over and tries to make heads or tails of it. What sort of Chantry business would require subterfuge like--

--ah.

Simon is not the most observant of men, nor the quickest on the uptake when he isn't expecting to have to be, but he can put two and two together well enough. Still, Gala is right, at least in her assessment that he's not going to pitch her onto the floor over it. Certainly not when the easels are all set up and preliminary sketching is underway.

"And what were they being moved from?"

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