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Entry tags:
I. CLOSED.
WHO: Sabine and Martel
WHAT: We were promised rescuing lost animals.
WHEN: Haring 16
WHERE: Skyhold and beyond.
WHAT: We were promised rescuing lost animals.
WHEN: Haring 16
WHERE: Skyhold and beyond.
Sabine had spent just enough time in Skyhold to get the chill off her bones and eat something warm before braving the colder, steeper climbs of the Frostbacks once more. She leads the way, gamely clambouring over grey rocks, gloved hands over feet strapped into sturdy, light-weight boots, and a woollen cape that billows out like a sail at each gust of wind. Her nose has been pink since introduction, staying pink once they'd left the queerly warm heights of the Skyhold fortress. Her hair has been tamed, barely, into a thick braid, curls slipping free, and long, slender ears nipped by frigid air.
"But you're not a demon," she is saying. They're on the topic of how the big burly human got shat out of a fade rift, which normally is demons. Her Orlesian accent curls musical in her otherwise husky voice. "And you're not from the Fade."
Bear with her, here.
She temporarily disappears over a ledge of rock and snow, the sound of leather skidding along ice audible, followed by the sound of a landing that doesn't imply she broke anything. But she expects an answer all the same -- there are only five reasons she would be taking this journey with a human man. One is that he's a fabled rifter. The other four are the knives she has hidden on her person.
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She watches her feet sink into snow as they walk.
"I don't talk to many shems," she finally offers. Not timidly, or sadly, but a factual statement as she tips her attention back up, gloved hands raising to push loose hair out of her face, back behind her ears. "Of course I'll find one that doesn't know nothing about Elvhen."
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"If I were to give you an equivalent," he says, instead, "I might say you remind me of a Styric. My little mother," an endearment, and if it were to be taken to mean she was his mother, who is he to object? In the end, she was, "was a daughter of Styricum. A difficult thing to be, in the heart of the most Elene of Elene nations."
Remembering her softens some of the harshness about him in a way he is undoubtedly not conscious of; he doesn't seem like the sort who might try to endear himself that way.
(He is. But not this instant.)
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But maybe a little mischievous, all the same.
But she doesn't get a reaction, because he is ignorant or smarter than that. Can't win 'em all. When he talks of equivalence, she looks over and up at him, curious. The corner of her mouth twinges up. "And is difficulty being in a place the thing that reminds you?"
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He is very carefully not smiling, when he says that, but for a man to swagger through the snow is no mean feat.
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"There's a law in Halamshiral. We elves aren't to carry knives any longer than our palms. But there's a saying about what happens when your kind push us around enough to push back -- mien'harel." Another break in the terrain, a steeper drop of ice and rock. Sabine steps past Martel, feeling the stones beneath her boots. "Even short blades need to be respected."
Rather than continue on, she peers off towards where a tree line is developing, recalling the landscape to herself.
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He doesn't recount this story because he thinks it flatters him, sets him up as some sort of hero to the undertrodden - he is not, and even then, he was not, however warmly self-righteous he felt after doing it - but rather because it doesn't, particularly. He meant well, but he was a boy with a boy's simple idea of the world and it hadn't really helped, or even always been particularly about the deed.
It is always so tempting to simplify these things down to those moments - it is tempting to simplify them here. Occasionally, he misses the days when he solved most of his problems by hitting them until he felt they were sufficiently solved.
"Is it familiar?"
--the landscape, not his violent youth. The snow makes looking for tracks, per se, a bit pointless - but any sign of passage is worth a glance, so he takes it. He's found harder game than one lost horse.
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"Oui," she says, of the landscape. "I saw the road ahead, wasn't sure if he'd make it, and set him free here. Maybe he'll be looking for food."
There is a note of guilt in her voice. She didn't exactly want to leave the old horse to his fate, nor did she want to tie him someplace only to starve to death. She starts her way down, loose pebbles and ice sliding under her feet, keeping her balance in a vaguely helterskelter fashion. "He won't have got too far. He was a slow fucker."
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But he would have been replaced, and with someone they knew less well to predict, and so it is a self-pityingly pointless fantasy in which Martel vastly overestimates his own essential purpose in the world. So perhaps it's just as well she's not quick to reward his modicum of self-awareness.
"How long has he had?" he asks, letting the rest go - not quite following her but fanning out a little, keeping her in easy reach on the offchance she loses her footing. He'd rather not have to dive for her, for pity's sake.
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And the rest is history. Maybe she doesn't operate in things like hours and minutes, but events, strung together like beads on a string. Or she doesn't want to admit how long it's been in actual quantifiable words. Who knows, it's an elven mystery.
As it happens, Sabine is as light on her feet as any stereotype about elves might inform. Her clothing isn't particularly on par with even the freelance rogues, her boots worn and her trousers made of wool and canvas, and the only armor she wears is the leather on her feet, the lambskin fitting her hands. More like a servant used to rough work than an adventurer, but maybe she makes up for it with enthusiasm. The last few feet of descent are done in wild lopes, landing firm on steadier ground.
She seems to choose a direction, headed to a specific tree that stands out from the rest. "He'd been nibbling on the moss, last I saw him," she says, gloved fingertips touching where soft horsey muzzle had worked it over with scarier teeth.
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He is not quite such a pedant as to announce it presently, mind you, when there are slightly more important things to attend to.
"He'll take the easiest route," he predicts, casting his eye from a vantage point nearby her chosen tree. "Damnably skittish creatures."
Even war horses are temperamental that way. Get the damned thing to do anything that isn't scamper towards some bloody apples -
"This way."