faderift | [open]

Done says the answering snap of her fingers. With an easy heft of her staff, Miriam turns the line of her staff from under her arm and hikes it across her shoulder and higher—hammer side just high enough in the air that when they pass through the doorway through to the crowded public house beyond (it seems they're not the first ones to have the idea that they might escape the cold here), the business end of the staff thumps the lintel hard enough to draw the eye of the first three closest tables and a withering glare from one of the serving girls.

"Whatever they've on tap will do," she tells him. Then without a backward glance for Vanya, Miriam wades into the crowded floor.

These many years later, with Riftwatch at its doorstep, people still instinctively give way for a mage's staff. It isn't a warm reception, but there are less effective ways to chase other patrons off and secure ownership of a cramped little table not so distant from the fire roaring in the great hearth at the rear of the room.

It's been a long day, and she's tired. Otherwise, she might look a little more pleased with herself when he returns.

Vanya, for his part, leaves the shovel neatly leaned out of the way near the door. (He doesn't need it for crowd management and he's not terribly worried about it being stolen. If someone needs it that badly, he'll have Riftwatch take it out of his wages.) He's not hard to keep an eye on, winding his way through the room. As it's crowded but not entirely packed, it doesn't take him long to return with two tankards of a reddish ale that may even benefit from a spice or two. For this part of town, it counts as fancy.

He slides hers to her and settles on the other side of the table. "Cheers," he adds. He's still not entirely sure how to take her initial invitation but not displeased to be sitting somewhere warm with a drink after a tiring afternoon.

The tankard is raised--an unspoken echo of the same sentiment--, then touched to the table with a thump. Miriam promptly sucks down a not insignificant portion of the contents as her attention wanders away, the immediate prospect of people watching being a far more approachable one than picking from a selection of pat small talk openings.

It's only once she's visually made a circuit around the room and has silently drained the first half of her ale that Miriam's attention skirts back. The tankard is set aside. She removes her gloves. She scuffs her reddened, cold-chapped cheeks with her palms and tucks that dark sheet of hair behind her ears--

Anyway.

"Where was your mercenary work?"

He doesn't seem to mind drinking in silence a bit, settling back as she sweeps the room. He's drinking a bit slower than she is, so he's more like a third in when she speaks up.

"...Ferelden, mostly. I was starting out from Skyhold, and to be honest, I do not speak much Orlesian. The country that spoke mainly Trade seemed the better bet. They do not get many Nevarrans, so it is not as if I blended in, but the people who needed to hire me generally were not doing so for my conversation." Just as well. He hadn't been eager to talk much, either.

It seems that he might leave it there as he takes a drink of ale. After a moment, though, he adds: "I never intended it to be forever. I just needed some time. I suppose that was selfish."

"Andraste forbid anyone have a life."

Is blunt. But if there is criticism in it--and there is that, despite what is evidently a patented lack of heat--, it's not exactly jabbing back across the table at him. It just is.

"Orlais isn't much to look at these days anyway." All fires scorched fields and townships gutted by the effort of sending every arm capable of carrying a sword or pike off to war. Val Royeaux might still be pretty, but she's never seen it and so can't remark one way or another. "But don't tell any Orlesians I said it."

The barest narrowing of the eyes, but it's not like she's wrong.

"I suppose the country where there was an active war on would have been the more logical place for a mercenary to go," he allows, of that. "But it wasn't ... the fighting wasn't the point. It was just the thing I knew how to do most likely to earn me enough for a place to sleep and something to eat. If I'd had another skill, it would have done just as well."

A pause again, a drink, but he can't actually leave it alone: "If I think stopping Corypheus is important to enough to come back for, it is not as if it was less important then." So maybe it was selfish to go, actually, so there. His tone is still mild.

She hums, a small thing. Point, it might mean for Miriam glances away again. Her eyes but not her attention rove briefly about the room, doing a circuit over the tops of bent heads and across the dice players shooting craps near the tap bar, following the progress of the pot girl as she passes along the length of the room to refill cups from a big striped stoneware pitcher.

And then back to Vanya. She's yet to fetch her drink back up.

"Your rank in the Templars. Did you ever have people reporting to you?"

Even if he were inclined to lie, there's little point when it's something she can easily verify for herself if she cares to. "I was a Knight Captain, when I resigned." It may be an answer in and of itself; he could leave it there, as it technically is an affirmative answer.

(He doesn't look about the room, though his eye contact is not so complete to be unsettling. When he's not looking at her, he's glancing at his drink or out at nothing in particular.)

"I haven't been directly in charge of anyone for years, though." He glances over the Mage-Templar War, and who he was and was not in charge of then, to add, "The Templars with the Inquisition were not well suited to integrating the individual hierarchies, without anyone having claim to being the hosts. I was disinclined to jockey for influence. The title had been largely a courtesy for years, by the time I renounced it." In more ways than the one she's asking about, but that one pertinently. "What makes you ask?"

Here, she does take up her cup and drinks from it.

"You don't strike me as one of those cold officers who sends walking wounded onto the field is all."

"Ah." He sits back in his chair a bit. "...you're an observant woman." And there, at last, is a bit of wryness, though any deprecation is purely aimed inward.

"My sister and I took a half dozen children out of Markham when we left it. I've the practiced eyes of a hawk."

She taps below one for emphasis. It's a cynical, dry breed of humor that she drinks down with her next sip of ale.

"And it helps that you've been telling on yourself. If the Inquisition's lack of order were the reason you left it, I can't imagine that you'd come to Kirkwall to pitch back into the fight instead of just answering the Divine's invitation."

A spread of the hands. Ta-da. What a good magic trick.

He tilts his cup to her, conceding the point. "I do not ask or expect sympathy from those who don't know me," he says, "but I think the least I can do is to be honest when someone asks. It is not as if I don't understand where the questions come from."

He's noticed how few templars and ex-templars are here (and, not incidentally, how different his demeanor is from the existing examples of the latter). It would have been hard to miss.

"And if I ask fewer questions of others myself," quieter, "it is not because I am not interested so much as I feel ... a lack of grounds."

"What grounds do you imagine the rest of the company has that you don't? Unless it's that they have the market on impropriety cornered already."

These are preferable questions compared to something like, 'Miriam, is there a reason you've chosen to needle a fellow newcomer instead of being prickly at some old hand of Riftwatch?' Nevermind that, and nevermind facts like how they hadn't been the only two agents of the Gallows tending to Kirkwall's streets or there is a card game in one of the fortress' dining halls tonight that she might have crashed if she just wanted easy company.

It's a reasonable question, if one that gives him pause. "...longer records with the organization. Less complicated histories before it."

Being a templar is Neverra is, he has since learned, somewhat different from being a templar elsewhere in the south; by now, he expects non-Nevarrans to look at him and see templar in their local dialect.

"Do you think I should be bolder, then?" A bold question in its own right, under the circumstances.

Danger, Smythe.

"Talking about only yourself is a poor way of making friends," she says, dry over the lip of the tankard. Then ammends to add, "—Is the advice I'd give anyone. I recall Little Kaja having trouble with the concept too."

"Sound advice," he says, after only a moment. "I prefer other topics of conversation, left to my own devices. I suppose I simply do not wish to cause anyone pain with unwelcome overtures." Another brief pause, and: "I do not assume an invitation for a drink is permission."

Perhaps he should be a little bolder in the name of not coming off like an awkward hitching post. It's worth considering.

"Anyone who wants to drink in silence takes themselves out for it," could sound sharp, a little bristly, but mostly doesn't. It's merely an observation--a simple, unvarnished statement of fact. Someone somewhere has probably described Miriam Smythe as cripplingly direct.

"And I doubt anyone who's already of a mind to tell you to fuck off on account of whatever oaths you took or renounced will much care about the particulars of what you say so much as the fact that you're saying them."

That's a fact too, fair or not.

She keeps making these reasonable points. "I suppose. It's not that I hope to win anyone over so much as ... minimize further harm, I guess. It sounds a bit foolish, now that I say it out loud."

He considers her for a moment, then adds, "What brought you here? To Riftwatch, not to drinking with me specifically." While he's been invited to ask a question.

"My sister has an anchor piece in her hand. I came with," is perhaps an obtusely consolidated representation of the timeline in question, but it isn't a lie.

"Joselyn. She's with the Research division. Similar to me in the face, better taste in clothes and jewelry. If you haven't met already, yoh will. She's apparently been making a nuisance of herself among your lot in the training yard in the mornings. Sword and shield humpers, I mean. Not—" Templars or ex-Templars or whatever.

He tilts his hand to indicate he'd followed. "I haven't had the pleasure of meeting her yet, but I'll keep an eye out. I can't imagine she'll be hard to miss, under the circumstances."

It would be easy, then, to slide back into (companionable?) silence. Instead, though, he offers, "Is she looking for any particular sort of training, or just seeing what's on offer?"

"You'd have to ask her," could be a full stop. But. "She's been at it with some Warden. Ellis something."

She lifts her tankard—and pauses.

"Why, are you offering?"

He's not not offering: "I don't presume I'm the only available option, or even the only one apart from the Warden. But I have taught swordplay before. I wouldn't mind doing so again, if she'd like." A brief pause, and then, deadpan: "I do, in fact, have skills beyond shoveling."

Edited 2021-03-13 19:00 (UTC)

All of this is accepted as fact with a nod and a certain air of unflinching seriousness.

"Right," she says. "Overthinking too."

Her resolve holds right up until she tips her drink. When it happens, Miriam's laugh is an undignified and half-quashed snort across the lip of the tankard. It comes seemingly standard with a pacifying gesture from her spare hand--so automatic that the two things practically overlap.

"Sorry, no. Don't offer; she won't appreciate it. I'll stop tugging the hook in your cheek."

Her laugh gets a smile from him. It's a good smile, warm. (Underused.) "I appreciate you saving me the embarrassment of taking you at your word. If it helps, you are far from the first person to make a note of the overthinking. Temperamental hazard, I'm afraid." He has, at least, relaxed a fraction.

After a moment, he adds, "I would like to know more about you, if you would like to say. It's only ... it is hard for me to not worry about misstepping. Prodding a wound out of ignorance. I know it can make me seem stiff."

He relaxes a fraction and as if in sympathy to it, her brief flash of humor and contrition both are smoothed away—made effectively invisible again in the span of her taking a drink.

"Are you accusing me of being wounded?" Is so reflexive that the beat which follows is visibly devoted to course correction in the name of stop tugging. So across the table from him, Miriam straightens. Squares her shoulders a little, both hands wrapping around the tankard.

"I know how to say no. Ask away."

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