faderift | MOD PLOT ↠ NONE TO RETURN

MOD PLOT ↠ NONE TO RETURN

WHO: All characters signed up to participate in the Battle of Ghislain
WHAT: The Inquisition regroups and heads home
WHEN: Covers the period immediately post-battle (11.28) through the journey back to Kirkwall (11.29-12.1)
WHERE: North of Montfort, Orlais, and on the road to Val Chevin
NOTES: This is Post #2, covering the immediate aftermath of the battle and the journey back to Kirkwall. It's a free-for-all. Post #1 covers the battle itself. More info on the OOC post.

The Inquisition and Orlesian armies eventually limp to a halt along the Imperial Highway north of Montfort, where wide fields and gentle hills offer clear lines of sight and a sparsely equipped fortress provides some shelter and fortification. It's a soundly strategic location—if Ghislain is lost, Montfort is the last major city between the invaders and Val Royeaux—but among the rank and file there may be too much chaos to appreciate it.

For the remainder of the day and well into the night, the fortress and surrounding land are a frenzy of activity. The wounded who were not left on the field must be triaged and tended to with limited supplies, while many healers and surgeons out of commission themselves and the remainder worked to the bone. Scouts, soldiers, and even support staff in sturdy enough condition to keep working may be tasked with assembling camp from the few remaining supplies, taking reports on known casualties or acquired intelligence, or further fortifying the new location. The Orlesian army sends one of its battered cavalry units toward Ghislain to attempt to provide some warning, and from the Inquisition's number a few patrols are sent back toward the battlefield or toward Ghislain, with stern orders not to re-engage, only to watch for signs of pursuit, and to direct any stragglers.

Those who remain in the fortress are in for a long, miserable night, with meager rations and makeshift bedding, if any of either, while the wind shifts directions and grows colder. By morning a number of the wounded have died, but attempts to build a pyre are hampered by the sudden swell of a storm that starts with freezing rain and then transitions to early and unpredicted thick, heavy snow.

For a few hours that morning the two armies attempt business as normal, but it soon becomes clear that the storm is getting stronger, and they risk being snowed in with more people than they can feed. Many, including the Inquisition's Gallows contingent, are ordered to disperse. Many crowd into wagons, with any transportable wounded receiving further attention en route and neighbors hunching close to preserve heat whether they like one another or not, while those able to do so follow on foot or horseback over the rough, flash-frozen highway toward Montfort and then west toward Val Chevin. The storm doesn't abate until they've nearly reached the city, but once there they're able to stop, eat, and spend a few hours indoors thawing out before proceeding home.

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And react as if she is so sustained she does, a flower turning towards the sun.

"Ah, see? I am already much improved," she exults, "when I have finished being so healed, you may come and join me in looking at everyone else and we shall all be the better for it."

Now that he is smiling, even slightly subdued as it is, the ridiculousness of their banter feels like settling into a well-worn groove. See? We have agreed to pretend again. How much easier, that? It is not the first time they have made a pocket of levity amidst less than favorable circumstances, although this is considerably worse than a room of Orlesian vipers. Alexandrie leans her head against her curled hand, an inquisitive tilt to it.

"Should you like to hear of how the town of Val Fontaine gained a swan as a guardsman?"

"By Andraste's dewy skin, yes." He offers her a stronger smile at that, and settles back, raising one arm up to pillow his head. "Go on, go on, please, you must."

"Very well, but only because you have entreated me so," Alexandrie replies amenably, as if she had not been the one to offer in the first place.

"It began with the hat of Madame du Marchand some five years ago, when it was en vogue to wear birds upon them. She, dear creature, took it into her head that she should outdo everyone by wearing a bird as a hat. A swan, no less. How her neck supported the fine feathered fellow I shall never know. Sheer strength of will, perhaps.

In any case, he had been fed some soporific or other and had been induced to drowse there—quite attractively, really—but a few hours into the party he woke up and was rather displeased with the entirety of the situation." She smiles benignly, "I have never before, nor after, heard a hat hiss quite so crossly."

"Only because no one has yet tried to set a fashion for hats made of cobras," By says. "I suppose it's only a matter of time before it's done, no? Perhaps not by Orlesians, though. Antivans, I think."

A tilt of his head, and then a little wince as he remembers why he oughtn't be tilting his head. "Do go on."

Her smile twitches as she briefly considers the idea of wearing Loki as a hat.

"Well and so, here is Madame du Marchand with an angry hat which is now awake enough to flap its wings. For a brief moment, she had the most glorious hat in existence. After this brief and glorious moment she no longer had a hat, nor a wig, nor a mask. Luckily, all eyes were on the swan at this juncture which allowed her an opportunity to escape, which she took with more alacrity than anyone wearing hoops has a right to. Now the hat is on the loose, still attached to the accouterments of Madame du Marchand." Alexandrie taps her chin consideringly for a moment. "Or now I suppose they may well be called his.

"Immediately thereafter the entire party became a riot of attempting to catch him, which was wildly superior to the gossip and other sport that was being had. He was having none of it and broke the arm of Monsieur de Montforte, if I recall correctly. I am, of course, a forward thinker, and saved my stamina until all others had exhausted themselves—swan included—and lured him with bread and a bit of quiet until I could trap him in my skirts and carry him off with Emile."

An affected gust of a sigh. "I regret that all present most likely saw clear to the tops of my stockings whilst my skirts were so engaged, but nothing much was made of it as I was the clear victor."

"My clever girl," he says, duly impressed. She got craftier after she left him, it seems. The girl he knew, she'd have gotten excited - maybe not chased after all the rest, but certainly wouldn't have anticipated the others' exhaustion. Certainly wouldn't have been a diabolical planner, like she became.

He's honestly quite caught up in the story. Sleep isn't a temptation now as he prompts her, "And what was your prize?"

“The swan himself, of course!” Alexandrie is pleased with herself now, preening under his approval as she continues. “We took him back to the estate and put him into the very pond you deemed it necessary to dive into in the hope of making him an elegant and storied addition to our household, but ah,” here she raises a hand to her forehead in affected grief, “it was not to be. Or at least, not how we had hoped it might. He went missing the very next day. I was briefly inconsolable until Emile came laughing back from the market in Val Fontaine the next day.”

“Apparently our feathered friend preferred civilization. He had wandered to the fountain in the market square and taken up residence there.” Her eyes sparkle with mirth, “He also, thereafter, broke up a tavern brawl that had spilled into the street and menaced a thief until the town guard appeared to take him into custody.”

"Ah," By says, weakly lifting a hand and gesturing through the air. The motion of his hand looks rather like a swan gliding through the air - only then to land upon the water, with all the ungainliness that involves.

"Let me guess. Thereupon he was pressed into the town guard. I'm actually rather shocked; in my experience, the guard of Val Royeaux hires rather subpar personnel."

"Ah, well, in Val Fontaine we attempt to hire only the finest of the fowl," she replies, the corner of her mouth twitching upwards. "In any case, Phillipe is well respected, and, I believe, a lieutenant. He has never abandoned his post save for the season in which he departed and returned with a wife, and she is a lovely enough creature that we all forgave him immediately. They and their brood live to this day in a pond the village got together to dig behind the guardhouse."

"And will it be a legacy of guard-swans?" Byerly asks, smiling in spite of himself at the story. Smiling quite genuinely. "The children raised into the patrolling life? I suppose that would make quite a terrifying squadron indeed. Terrifying even the most recalcitrant of criminals."

"Well, we would not wish to press them into service they did not desire, but we all have fond hopes for such a legacy."

He is lovely, when he smiles. Has ever been so. Even if it is a bit different now, with the mustache. Alexandrie almost reaches out to tug one end of it.

"How fine it would be to be able to say, generations from now, that Val Fontaine has always had a swan in the guard." she says instead, tilting her head further into her hand with a smile of her own. "We should have to change our crest."

"It would only be appropriate," he says. A hand comes up; his fingertips rest lightly upon her collarbone, then dare a little higher, tracing the line of her throat. "The clan has always had the most astonishingly swanlike necks."

It's not appropriate, of course. It's a liberty he wouldn't take under normal circumstances, not with her half-married to her Vint. But here, he can blame the head-wound.

She goes suddenly still, the easy fondness dropping from her face to be replaced by a stricken look that quickly turns to guarded neutrality as she raises a hand to curl her fingers around his, pull it gently from where it has traced and lower it. Even so she keeps it, held between her own like something precious—or something dangerous—at her knee.

Even that is too much. Ungloved as she is it is warm, and she wants to find the calluses, to again spread her fingers beneath his to compare the length of them. To count freckles, seek out scars both new and old.

How many other hands had she so readily held today without this tight breathless pounding in her? Had he felt it under his fingertips, before she had moved his hand? Why this? Why now? Could he not have had more luck in battle, so as to be up and walking now, not needing such attention? Could he not have stayed in Kirkwall? Could he not have stayed in Ferelden? She looks down so he will not see the shine that gathers in her eyes as she runs her thumb carefully along his before placing his hand gently back in his lap.

After all, Alexandrie has no such head wound to blame.

“How did you become so old?” she asks quietly, looking back up once she is sure she is composed, a smile on her face again. “I have not aged, of course. That would be terribly vulgar.”

Perhaps there's pleasure in her retreat from him. That look is either pain or it is disgust. And if it's pain, then perhaps he should find pleasure in the fact that she regrets what she did. Perhaps he should enjoy that she made a mistake in setting him aside and knows it and that it torments her. And if it is disgust, then he should find masochistic pleasure in her disgust, that she detests him as he ought to be detested. He should love nothing so much as he loves that flinch of hers.

"My child," Byerly replies, "a toy only remains preserved when you keep it carefully in its box. When you abandon it outside, it's going to be weathered by the wind and sun."

It is true, though. She's being facetious, but the years have not been so kind to him as they've been to her. She's still fresh-faced and lovely, even smudged with battle, even wounded as she is, even with the long months at war. He is aged and crumpled. Perhaps it's a good heart that keeps one preserved? After all, for all of his bitterness and spite, she is a good woman. He has spent these past years in games of betrayal and hatred and spite, winning his supper through lies and danger. He has nearly died; he has certainly killed; and more than that, he has rended and wrecked a hundred souls. Of course that would age him. As the evil of the Blight rots bodies, so too does human evil.

"A fellow needs to eat," is all he says to all of that.

What to that? Again apologize, say she had not wanted to so very much that she had to? What use that, after all these years? Yes, she had been afraid, terribly so, that all she would ever buy with her heart would be grief, but had she not immediately made truth of that herself? For all the roughness and cruelty of those he sometime aided, there had been music and laughter and those who were as kind and Byerly Rutyer had been no Rolant de Ezoire.

But she had been.

That slow-dawning realization brings with it a sort of crawling horror. Although Alexandrie had made no promises of love, of marriage even, despite the difference in their stations as Rolant had, she had smiled, had been kind when she had meant from the start to cut her teeth on him. And yes, she had grown to genuinely care for him, to love him even, as the young do, but in the end she had done it all the same. What did it matter, what bitter tears she had shed afterwards? Byerly had never seen them. She had made sure of that.

She is staring, she realizes, a trembling hand raised to cover her mouth. Again looks wildly about to see if there is someone else who can take her place here. Then stops. What if there is? Turn her back and abandon him again with no explanation, with him having suffered such wounds? But she can think of no other stories to tell. And so, quiet again, “Why do you not hate me?”

How strange. It had not been his intention to send her into that little paroxysm of misery. Usually, when he wounds someone, he doesn't do it by accident. What a clumsy fool he is.

Why doesn't he hate her? Who's to say I don't? Because there have been days when he did detest her, particularly in the early days. After she'd turned from him, he'd left - abandoned his networks of friends and allies, the channels he'd found for survival, so that he wouldn't have to look on her face any longer; in those days, he'd blamed her for his failures of survival, the days when he slept in the open or ate nothing at all, as though she'd driven him from the city rather than him voluntarily fleeing. But that was stupid, blaming her. Hating her in general - that was stupid. Alexandrie was simply repeating the lessons she'd been taught.

"What am I to hate you for?" he asks. His voice is droll; his smile is false but unwavering. "Having cold hands? You can't help it, even if you did quite chill my skin just now."

She shakes her head at that, albeit only slightly. Would press a little farther, as she had on the stairs, but why? What would it gain either of them but further injury? He does not wish to speak on it, and even if he did, what would it change between them?

So instead Alexandrie blows on her hands and rubs them together, although they hardly need the added warmth, buying into the fiction to escape.

“Ah, forgive me. I have ever been too cold for your comfort.” Her smile is light polite apology. As unwavering as his, as false.

He wonders if he could possibly close his eyes and go to sleep and never wake up again. Is that why they have you stay awake after a head injury? Is death on the other side? He'd thought he would die out there, after the blow struck his head; he'd thought that would be the end of him. It's strange, the pang he feels, that he's continuing on.

"But as cold as I deserve," he responds. "The suffering you bring me is well earned, ma cherie."

“Arrêtez, Byerly.” It comes out quiet and insistent. “Whatever it is you have done, you earned nothing such. Not from me.” She reaches to brush a bit of his hair straight, light as a whisper, ultimately doing nothing to right it at all.

“I paid you with poor coin I should not have passed and it was cruel, and fearful, and foolish, and I will not hear otherwise.”

Easy enough to say, now. Now that she was with her sister, had friends, a beloved whom others would think twice to cross, a place in the Inquisition, was out of Orlais. Now that she was not trying to claw her way to being seen as predator rather than prey. Hindsight is ever so unkind.

She wonders, distantly, the feel of his hair still on her fingertips, what other life she had cast aside along with him.

Perhaps they could have been troubadours.

How little she knows. Maybe she was right, once upon a time: maybe the Byerly of back-then didn't truly deserve what she did to him. Maybe. He was a sad and fearful fool, corruptible and corrupted, drunken and dissolute, a little coward who'd kiss up to anyone for a mouthful of food and two gulps of wine. No one to love or praise, but no one to truly despise, either. Maybe. Perhaps.

But the Byerly of now deserves so much worse than this. He deserves it for what he's done, and what he will do. She doesn't realize, of course, that this cause she's fighting for, this cause she bled for, this cause she'll bear scars for - For him, it's merely a means to an end. If she knew his heart, his true character, she'd find a doctor to pour a tincture down his throat that would send him off to oblivion. She would sing him a lullaby to put him into sleep.

Was it her fault, that he turned wicked? - No; it's a laughable thought. He always had the seeds of cruelty in him. He's always been a weak and cowardly fellow. Perhaps she cultivated them a bit more than most, but...Poor girl sees herself as a villain. She simply doesn't know who it is who's under her hands.

"What do you wish from me, Alexandrie?" he responds simply. His smile is shaded, his eyes opaque. "Words of hatred? I'll deliver if that will bring you satisfaction."

What does she wish from him? What would satisfy her?

Alexandrie is silent for a while, looking at her hands.

Miss me. Miss me as I miss you. Tell me you wish for one more yesterday, one more evening turning to night turning to morning wrapped in cloaks and naming the stars, one more bar of music. Tell me that when you stopped hating me, if you stopped hating me, that sometimes you loved me. Tell me that you, too, are sometimes seized with fruitless wonderings scented like the château gardens at Val Fontaine.

Or hate me. Hate me well and long and irrevocably enough to kill this thing in me. Say any warmth you have shown me is a lie meant in vengeance, that I harvest now the thorns I planted years ago.

Or say I matter not at all. Not enough to love; not even enough to hate.

Hold me, or let me go.

"I wish you to stay awake," she says, managing a small clear-eyed smile that only trembles in the slightest. Ignoring the little single splash of warmth on her hand.

Edited 2018-12-09 13:07 (UTC)

What a relief. What a disappointment. He does not want to deal with everything that would come with sorting through all this mess - or perhaps the issue is that he simply cannot. When a war is being fought, who can possibly untangle a tangled history? Who has the free hands to do so? When one is serving one's country, bleeding for it, who can dwell on love? Matters of honor must always trump matters of the heart.

And yet. He wishes he could hear what to do to make it better. To make her stop crying. And yet - What care do you have for whether or not she cries, Byerly? She made her decision long ago. And yet -

"Well," he says, with a little laugh, turning his eyes away from her. "At least that is a simple enough task. Tell me another story."

How dare it hurt as much to be looked away from as it does to be looked at? She nearly laughs.

"Very well."

But what to tell? In the years between there had been little true adventure. Petty schemes, empty victories, hearts won and discarded for the count of them. She had succeeded in what she had set out to do when she finally stopped her fragile hollow weeping and came back to some semblance of life with the end of the winter of her seventeenth year, driven by vengeance and spite and as hard as the soil. She had danced, laughed, fucked, and lied her way to the highest place she could reach with her name. She had been feared, fawned over, had punished everyone who had poisoned her. Everyone save Rolant de Ezoire.

And it had all—all of it—been utterly and completely barren of the things that fine tales are made of. Of love, of family, of struggle, of journey taken with meaning. Those things, the things she had closed the door on after pushing him out through it, she had let back in along with Loki, and she will not tell those tales.

What then? Card their past clean and spin it into some gossamer tale of the adventures that had belonged to some other happier two in some other happier world? How saccharine. How piteous.

Has she any stories worth the telling?

Perhaps a long time ago she had.

"I cannot recall; did I tell you of the time Geneviève and I got ourselves lost for an entire day in the woods?"

Perhaps she had; perhaps she hadn't. Byerly can't remember. There have been many frivolous stories told over the years, and none of them have mattered for anything. Most of them have been lies. He knows that if it were Lexie lying here injured (a sickening thought), he would tell her a string of lies - funny little tales, things that did not remotely reflect his real life. No stories of betrayal. No stories of the slow seduction of men far worse than her Rolant, of worming his way into their lives, of making himself their ally and champion. He won't tell her of the rumors he's started and spread - never regarding innocent people, no, but at times regarding people who did not deserve this poison. He'd tell a funny little story of playing the violin. Of getting lost in the woods. Never stories of letters from his sister than have gone unanswered; never stories of the feeling of death under his hands.

He'd killed - a lot of people today. He wishes the blow could have wiped out that memory. Maker, but the feeling of knife hitting bone is one he wishes he could drive from his head -

"I do not remember it," he answers pleasantly. "Begin the story, and I'll see if it rings a bell."

"We were eleven or so, and quite taken with stories of Bards and Chevaliers and adventurous travel and daring, and so became determined that we would go on our own. And so, one day, we set off for the woods on the estate and—" Someone wakes up, a short distance away, and begins screaming again. There is bustle, a sleeping draught, something, and it quiets. Alexandrie sits, white-faced, her hands clenched. And had never known this. They had been in such small danger that it is suddenly unfathomably unacceptable to recount.

Quietly, then.

"I am terrified that this will never stop and I shall be hearing these things at night forever. That I will abandon the dying for the living who will become the dying who I will lift to be burnt by the hundreds until it is me who is so abandoned with only the hope of being found and so lifted. That all of it will be churned to mud and broken and remade for the glory only one creature remembers.

"But this is not the first war. Has the world always been this, while I played so blithely at it? While so many still play?" She looks at her hands again, white and unmarked, her nails still the perfect ovals they had been before the Inquisition took the field.

"We meandered for half the day, seeking out the most difficult paths. It began to rain, Evie made us a shelter, and we sat beneath it as our tracks disappeared to us, and for a while it was all real. It is still there. I went and looked for it when we visited, and it was so very close. We were lost together so very close."

It is usually a more amusing story.

"How is... do you hurt terribly? I shall tell a better one."

Edited 2018-12-10 21:21 (UTC)

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