There have been signs. The feeling of being watched here, a snapped twig in the dark on an isolated road, someone in peripheral vision in the cities who turned and vanished before a head could turn to look. The sorts of things that can be explained away, individually. But together perhaps enough to make it the last piece of a puzzle, instead of the first, when a piece of furniture slides and clunks on the floorboards in the dark inn room that Ellis and Adrasteia are sharing, in the very early hours of the morning.
The shape that caused the noise freezes. She's shadowed but not invisible, because the wooden window shutters are open and moonlight is leaking in—around a second dark form, crouched on the sill with the slope of a tiled roof and the stone building across the alleyway gleaming behind him.
They're both very still, hoping that the creak won't be enough to wake the Wardens, with the distant jangle of music and hum of conversation still emanating from the floor below.
At the first sign they're wrong, the man in the window will sacrifice silence for trying to jerk his staff off his back and through the window frame.
Because Ellis is rolling up and out of bed to launch himself towards the window. If the man in the window is not in the room very quickly, he will be off the sill and perhaps down to the ground in a hurry.
There is an extreme number of things about this situation that are less than ideal, and the fact that they're beset by at least one mage is going to be difficult in a very closed space. But still, that's no reason to hesitate.
Adrasteia's eyes are open and she's rolled out of bed in the second following Ellis' movement. She slept with her staff under the blankets with her and takes a swing in the dark with it for the person crouching nearby.
There's a good chance she misses, what with it being dark and all, but there's always the chance that she doesn't.
Ellis' advance stops the man in the window—Caladrius—from getting more than halfway through his attempt to cast a spell. (Sleep, it would have been, making all of this much simpler.) But he flips his staff into the room in time to brace it longways over the window frame and uses it to propel himself inward, meeting Ellis midway and feet-first before he hits the floor.
It is at least slightly better than hitting the cobblestones below.
On the other side of the bed, Tirena leans back from the shadowy swing of Adrasteia's staff in time to save her head, but not her shoulder. "Shit," she hisses, less for the pain than for how badly everything is suddenly going. There's a glint of metal in her hand when she rights her balance and tries springing forward to slash at Adrasteia's arm.
With only the briefest glance over his shoulder to doublecheck that Adrasteia is unhurt, Ellis immediately reconfigures, swinging one fist directly for Caladrius' face.
There is only one way Ellis knows to deal with mages: stay as close as possible and hit as hard as possible, until they're down. There's nothing else he can do. No resistances, no magic of his own, just brute strength against whatever Caladrius can do with that staff.
And Adrasteia has her own troubles. He can't expect her to sort this out as well.
Tirena does catch Adrasteia's elbow with her knife as the Warden tries to move out of the way, causing her to hiss in pain as she's rolling towards the bed and coming to her feet with her staff in her left hand. She's not going to waste the breath on healing right now, but she can do one of several things:
Take another swing with her staff, or Summon a knight enchanter's blade, or Cast fire magic in these close quarters.
The third option is tossed out immediately, and Adrasteia goes for the second, a spectral blade forming in the space between herself and Tirena, aiming for the woman's midsection.
Whatever Tirena expected, it was not that. Her step back isn't fast enough to stop the flesh over her ribs from splitting in the wake of that translucent blade, and she says, "Cal," looking for an assist as she backs into the same table she'd knocked into while they were asleep.
But Caladrius is choking on one of his own teeth and a swelling mouthful of blood, at the moment, courtesy of Ellis' fist. His staff is caught under him. Dispelling Adrasteia's blade far out of the realm of his current capabilities.
He either lacks Adrasteia's situational awareness or does not care, though, because he does what he is capable of without a staff: a burst of flame out of his hands. One is aimed at Ellis; the other is scrabbling for purchase against the floor beside the nearest bed. A large swathe of the blanket catches immediately.
"Fucking mages," Tirena hisses while she pushes away from the table to swing a kick at Adrasteia's legs.
Ironically, Ellis' internal monologue is following along similar lines as he pitches to the side trying to avoid the flames. It's a narrow miss; the heat scorches along the side of his face, but nothing catches.
Maybe it would have been worth catching on fire if he'd been able to pin Caladrius, but alas.
"Damn it," is pitched loud, as Ellis comes back up off his knees.
Caught between leaving Caladrius or tending to the fire, Ellis decides—
To make another go at knocking the rest of Caladrius' teeth out.
Adrasteia would join in the overall attitude towards mages if she had a moment to catch her breath; alas, Tirena's kick hits her in the lower leg and she topples backward, hitting the back of her head on the beside table even as the spirit blade takes another swipe forward.
The impact has her reeling, vision going sideways, but battle experience and practice have her crouched almost immediately, staff out in front of her, waiting for Tirena to make another attempt at... something.
Also, the bed is on fire. Or at least the blankets are. That elicits a "Shit!" out of Adrasteia who is much too close to the burning furniture, thanks.
Under the weight of Ellis' fist, Caladrius loses another tooth.
Also, consciousness.
Tirena has no way to know this, except perhaps by judging from his silence and the absence of any further fire (or ice, or lightning, because why wouldn't he make this worse in new and exciting ways if he could) erupting from where he's pinned by Ellis. But she's fed up enough to be willing to cut her losses, either way.
She throws her dagger at Adrasteia, with a professional's ease but not much precision. It's meant less to kill than to keep the elf dodging long enough for her to swing around, grab a wooden chair, and throw it at her as well.
Then she's darting for the window, past the flaming bed and Ellis and Cal, willing to dive head-first if she has to.
Adrasteia would like nothing more than to focus on putting out the fire before the entire room is alight. However, having both a knife and a chair thrown at her are distraction enough.
The spirit blade dissipates after a final swipe, and Adrasteia puts her staff up in front of her arms to knock the chair aside. It mostly works.
She's definitely got a concussion though, so. Good times had by all.
Tirena's bleeding twice over now, from the ribs and from the hip where Adrasteia's spirit blade bites at her, as she launches herself at the window, but she still has the clarity required to see Ellis' flame-lit shape hurtling into her peripheral vision.
She changes course as quickly as she can. Which is not quickly enough. But her twisting, skidding slide means only her legs are in Ellis' path, rather than her entire body, and she goes down flat on the floor instead of hitting the wall or the window sill. Immediately she's struggling—struggling to free a leg to fulfill the dream of kicking Ellis in the face, struggling to free a second blade from where it's strapped to her hip—with the urgency of someone who expects to die shortly.
The fire on the bed crawls toward the headboard and the walls.
Caladrius emerges from his blackout in time to turn his head, choking and gurling blood until he can breathe again, too dazed to do much else.
It's a good kick, right to Ellis' mouth. The immediate consequence: a split lip, maybe a broken nose. Either way, blood is streaming down his face into his beard.
But it's not enough to dislodge him. It is enough to keep him from reeling her in, so he just remains an obstacle, preventing her from standing.
"Adrasteia!" comes as a bellow, aware of the gurgling that heralds Caladrius' potential return to the brawl.
The great thing about Tirena throwing a blade at her is that now Adrasteia has an extra blade easily at hand, instead of just tucked under her robes as her own is.
Ellis' yell has her turning fast enough to make bile rise in her throat (head injuries, yay) and while she doesn't know what she could immediately do with the kicking and bleeding whirlwind that is Tirena on the floor, she knows what to do with a man coming to who might complicate matters; she crosses the small space and hits him, square in the jaw, with the end of her staff before he can completely rouse, putting a knee on his chest to keep him there.
Then she throws Tirena's blade back at her, aiming for her shoulder.
Caladrius goes slack again, face a mess, limbs akimbo. He's definitely winning the competition for worst morning, here, in his opinion. Or that will be his opinion when he's capable of having any. If that ever happens again.
But Tirena isn't far behind anymore, when her lost dagger embeds into her shoulder—the shoulder she needed for her other blade, specifically. It skitters across the floor like a noisy metal spider, just further than she can reach when she tries twisting to grab it.
The attempt squeezes more blood out of her wounds, and it's finally pain she can't block out. She exhales and lies flat for a moment, takes a deep breath, and looks toward the light in the room. The fire, threatening now to catch the wooden headboard, a side table. The mattress aflame. If it falls it might catch the floorboards, and if Adrasteia knows the wrong bag of magic tricks to stop a fire, then there's a glimmer hope for all of them dying here together instead of only her and stupid stupid Caladrius.
So she resumes putting up a squirming, clawing, increasingly blood-soaked fight—not with any hope of getting free of Ellis, so much as hope of not letting him have a moment to turn his attention elsewhere.
And it works, because Ellis isn't letting go of her. Pinning her might be a near-impossibility, but letting her escape gets them no answers, sets them up for a second attempt at whatever they'd been trying to accomplish.
"Can you put this out?" is a wasted question, shouted through a mess of blood. What he's really considering is the likelihood of getting the pair of them out. Below them, screams and clattering signals the rest of the inn fleeing, and if either of them had any sense they'd join them, and yet—
"I'll try," comes her answer, and she takes a breath, gets off of Caladrius, and lays hands on one corner of the mattress. Ice spreads from her fingers along the fabric, battling the fire for dominance over the space, but the ice, for once, is working in Adrasteia's favor. Once a pillow is entirely covered in icicles she picks it up and begins hitting the fire on the headboard and the nightstand until she's managed to put it all out.
There's no rescuing that mattress, not really, or the blankets and sheets that were on it; the bedframe is singed in places that means it probably will need replacing, and the wall is still smoking a little, but considering the fact that they're all alive and not currently on fire she'll take it.
She'll also just. Throw up in a corner quietly when her spinning head refuses to stop said spinning.
As the flames die and the room grows dark again, the fire recedes from Tirena, too, until she's lying still and breathing hard, with no more spite or hope or adrenaline to push her past the pain and blood loss. The only thing to distinguish her from Caladrius, who's still passed out cold from Adrasteia's blow, is the glint of her open eyes, fixed furiously on Ellis' face.
The relative quiet—relative due to the noise below and outside, as people panic and rush around, and whatever quiet sounds Adrasteia's concussed nausea might be causing in the corner—is shattered by the door rattling, then a fist pounding on it.
As Tirena stops trying to thrash her way out of his grasp, Ellis levers himself cautiously upright over her. Pinning her underneath his weight, he turns only enough to catch sight of Adrasteia.
The yelling at the door is more or less ignored.
"Are you alright?" is very much for Adrastiea. Tirena is clearly fine, or fine enough to have put up an irritating, exhausting fight.
She pushes some hair out of her face with a groan, using her other arm to lean against the wall — which is still smoking, but she's used to fire magic, so it doesn't bother her any. "My head hurts," is very elegantly put.
The door rattles again and she yells out "Nous sommes bien ici!" before groaning and peering at Ellis from across the room. "How's your nose?"
She does fetch Ellis the rope, while muttering "oh, do shut up," at Tirena. That probably just means she'll talk more or something, right? Possibly.
Adrasteia picks up the knife from the floor and removes the one from Tirena's shoulder with a tsk, wiping it on the ruined bedspread. She does not offer to do anything for the bleeding, instead gesturing towards Ellis. "Do you want me to heal it?" She imagines he'll turn her down, but.
Tirena hisses through her teeth at the admonition, but she doesn't talk more. If it were only a question of having an attitude, she absolutely would do it out of spite. But various things hurt a lot, she's feeling slightly faint, and most of all she's turning her furious stare from Ellis' face to locate her other knife—the one that wasn't in her shoulder, the one that's just out of reach on the floor.
It's still too far to reach. It doesn't come any closer while her hands are bound.
Caladrius doesn't stir until it's too late for him to resist the ropes, and then it's only to groan and spit congealing blood, with so little force that it only flops out of his mouth and slides down his chin.
For him and that pathetic attempt, Tirena musters up the will to speak again, Tevinter accent on full display now that she's moving past curses and monosyllables: "What is even the point of you?"
Tirena's vitriol draws a thick chuckle from Ellis. Both threats dealt with for the moment, Ellis sits down heavily on the floor beside Tirena. He sniffs, winces, then shakes his head. His knuckles are swelling, but that barely merits a downward glance.
"Make sure they'll live first," he tells her. "The Scoutmaster and the Commander will want to speak with them."
And Ellis' nose will keep. It's been broken before, and repaired before, and has come out well enough.
"Clearly the point was not to win," Adrasteia says archly. Because. That's what happened, isn't it?
Either way. She puts the knives away, first, and then reaches out a hand to Tirena's shoulder, breathing deeply as the knife wound knits itself together beneath her touch. She doesn't heal it enough to do much more than stop the bleeding and clear any infection from the wound, so it's still going to hurt quite a bit. Plus she'll have trouble using it for a while.
Caladrius' injuries are a little more complex. She's not going to regrow his teeth, and his jaw is still... a mess of pain, but she also stops his bleeding and aligns the bones for the slow process of healing properly.
She puts a hand on Ellis' shoulder when she has to climb to her feet again to keep herself from toppling over. Her head is still spinning a bit, and it's not something she can do anything about except wait it out.
She won't address the break in his nose directly, but she does what she can to take the pain away in the few seconds they have contact. Side effects might include a lowering in the swelling in his hands as well.
Under Adrasteia’s care, Caladrius looks like a confused but grateful dog; Tirena looks maybe an inch of maturity above snapping her teeth.
“I think,” Caladrius says, sounding congested and reasonable, “we should—“
Tirena snaps, “Shut up,” and he does.
For a moment, at least. It’s less obedience than a pause to see if she has more to contribute before he says, reproachfully, “This was your idea,” in a tone that really means, stop being mean to me.
Adrasteia's ministrations don't go unnoticed. Ellis' hand comes up briefly to steady her at her hip, though he doesn't look away from the pair of trussed up captives on the floor.
"You should sit, Adrasteia," Ellis tells her. It's the kind of suggestion that is actually an order. She's hurt and there's not much Ellis can do for her, but if she collapses it will be bad for them both.
To Tirena, Ellis directs, "Your idea to ambush in the night, or to follow us in the first place?"
Presumably the former, and someone directed them to engage in the latter. He's obligated to ask, but doesn't expect much of an answer. Interrogation is for others more skilled than him. Toting the pair of them back to Kirkwall will be inconvenient, but what's the alternative?
Adrasteia sits, rather like a bag of potatoes she thinks, on the floor at the foot of the burnt bed. She'd rather splash her face with some water, or drink some even, but doing much more than sitting seems like quite a feat at the moment.
She's trying to sort out the logistics of taking the pair with them. Probably tied to horses; two riders per horse is doable, especially given Adrasteia's Avvar horse, but that is too close quarters most likely. The woman will pose a problem no matter how they do it, she's certain of it.
Caladrius gets a tight-lipped smile as Adrasteia begins the process of taking the braids she'd slept in down. It's something to do with her hands, to pull her attention from the dull pain in her head, and she's not feeling overly friendly at this exact moment.
The fire is crackling between them. Ellis is sitting up on his bedroll, elbows on his knees. He's been quiet for the past several nights since they met on the road. Around them the forest is quiet, dark shrouding them as they divide the contents of the cookpot between them.
"Did you hear of any Wardens near Courciennes?" he says, breaking the silence at last.
A nod. There's no part of that he hasn't heard before. It's unremarkable. How many villages have they both seen that met that fate? How often was it the way of things in the Blight? How often after?
"At Holmfirth, the only ones who survived were children," he begins, brow furrowed as he looks into the fire. "The eldest is the one who told me what happened."
That, in and of itself, was a terrible thing. The only good fortune was that the children had family, that they wouldn't be alone. But still—
"She said something that I've not been able to stop thinking of."
Too many. Too many to recall them all properly, too many to count. Occasionally Adrasteia considers taking up an old map, maybe one dated around the beginning of the Blight, just to see how many places have ceased to be in that timeframe.
Still. Children are a tender place for Adrasteia, and she murmurs 'Maker's breath' under her own. Hands him a bowl and waits to see what he'll say, what this child had communicated to him.
Maybe he won't say anymore. The stretch of silence in the wake of her exclamation goes on long enough that she'd be forgiven for assuming Ellis had simply wanted to say this thing: that there had been children, and they had survived, and they understood the price their parents had paid to ensure it.
It's a hard thing to live with.
But then, Ellis goes on, quieter, "She told me she saw a Warden. At first, what she was telling me sounded as if they were doing as they were meant to. But some of it..."
A shake of his head. The bowl is tipped in one hand.
She's learning, however, that a stretch of silence from Ellis does not necessarily mean he has finished speaking and so she exercises patience in the moment, shifting the cooking pot from the fire in favor of heating water for tea. She always has tea with her, even on excursions such as these; you never know when a small creature comfort might come in handy, and they're both Wardens besides. A little help with sleeping in the form of mint tea is not going to be remiss.
Keeping her hands busy also means not simply staring at him as he determines what information to share with her, and how, so she has to look up again when he speaks.
"Tell me." What he means, what he was told. She can handle it. Perhaps they can figure it out together.
Ellis' brow furrows into a frown. Not for Adrasteia, not really, but for the topic at hand. It's not only this story. It's the thing behind it, this bigger implication that Ellis can't make sense of.
"She was only a wee little thing," Ellis says first, words coming slowly, dropping like stones between them. "Scared to death and pretending otherwise."
A fact that's stuck in his mind, for so many reasons. This small girl, scared of him, scared of what she was trying to remember, squaring her jaw to bite out answers to questions Ellis was sorry to ask.
"Some of what she said made it sound as if the Warden were cooperating with the darkspawn," Ellis continues. His gaze has dropped to his hands, thumb working over his palm, the bent fingers of his hand. "But I couldn't tell if that's a true thing, or if it's an impression that came out of fear and confusion. At a point, I couldn't press her for anything else. You understand."
They're Wardens. They know exactly what it is to talk to people too shell-shocked by what they've survived to speak of it clearly, or at length.
She finishes the process of making the mint tea, waiting for it to cool a bit before handing off a cup to Ellis as he finishes speaking. Adrasteia can remember being a child during the Blight; the terror and the sadness at finding her parents, hiding from darkspawn, her mother's long and lingering death, and the firm kindness of Wardens asking her questions then bringing her to her cousin's.
"I don't think we can risk the possibility that what she saw and tried to communicate with you wasn't real." She takes her own teacup between both hands and blows on the surface of her tea. "Not after everything else we've been dealing with, here."
A sigh and she takes a sip. "There were three of them, in Vitroluçon. Two elves and a human, I think; a letter in poorly written Tevinter that the Lady d'Asgard translated as apologizing for what was happening to the people there. A Warden turned against our side is not an unreasonable consideration."
Even without the letter, with only what they know of what has become of certain factions of Wardens—
"The Wardens were apologizing?" he asks first, then tacks on, "Was it addressed?"
Is it a more welcome subject? The diversion away from three children who had survived something horrible to instead consider some new atrocity from which no one might manage to escape alive?
"No, not the Wardens, but the elves who were with the human there. They said his name is Eburnus, with a friend in Val Chevin with a green house, and that the darkspawn follow the Wardens, and that they were sorry about our people. The people in Vitroluçon, I presume, but it could be wider than that."
Adrasteia takes a breath. "It wasn't addressed, it was left behind to be found. I don't think the elves who were there want to be involved in this, but I don't think they have much of a choice, either." Then, a sip of tea.
Ellis is quiet for a long stretch after that, watching the fire. The tea is still warm, but he doesn't sip it. He is thinking of what he and Richard have been haphazardly collecting. Of what might become of that. Of what Ellis will need to do, where he will need to go. He will need to make the arrangements for that soon.
While he sits and ponders, Adrasteia finishes her tea, and pours herself another cup.
"I don't know. I'd like to imagine they would, but there's no way to be certain."
After all, the letter wasn't a call for help, exactly. More of an apology, and a means of finding the person who'd been leading the matter, she thinks.
"I think, if we were to try, we'd have to get them away from the human they're with first."
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The shape that caused the noise freezes. She's shadowed but not invisible, because the wooden window shutters are open and moonlight is leaking in—around a second dark form, crouched on the sill with the slope of a tiled roof and the stone building across the alleyway gleaming behind him.
They're both very still, hoping that the creak won't be enough to wake the Wardens, with the distant jangle of music and hum of conversation still emanating from the floor below.
At the first sign they're wrong, the man in the window will sacrifice silence for trying to jerk his staff off his back and through the window frame.
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Because Ellis is rolling up and out of bed to launch himself towards the window. If the man in the window is not in the room very quickly, he will be off the sill and perhaps down to the ground in a hurry.
There is an extreme number of things about this situation that are less than ideal, and the fact that they're beset by at least one mage is going to be difficult in a very closed space. But still, that's no reason to hesitate.
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There's a good chance she misses, what with it being dark and all, but there's always the chance that she doesn't.
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It is at least slightly better than hitting the cobblestones below.
On the other side of the bed, Tirena leans back from the shadowy swing of Adrasteia's staff in time to save her head, but not her shoulder. "Shit," she hisses, less for the pain than for how badly everything is suddenly going. There's a glint of metal in her hand when she rights her balance and tries springing forward to slash at Adrasteia's arm.
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There is only one way Ellis knows to deal with mages: stay as close as possible and hit as hard as possible, until they're down. There's nothing else he can do. No resistances, no magic of his own, just brute strength against whatever Caladrius can do with that staff.
And Adrasteia has her own troubles. He can't expect her to sort this out as well.
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Take another swing with her staff, or
Summon a knight enchanter's blade, or
Cast fire magic in these close quarters.
The third option is tossed out immediately, and Adrasteia goes for the second, a spectral blade forming in the space between herself and Tirena, aiming for the woman's midsection.
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But Caladrius is choking on one of his own teeth and a swelling mouthful of blood, at the moment, courtesy of Ellis' fist. His staff is caught under him. Dispelling Adrasteia's blade far out of the realm of his current capabilities.
He either lacks Adrasteia's situational awareness or does not care, though, because he does what he is capable of without a staff: a burst of flame out of his hands. One is aimed at Ellis; the other is scrabbling for purchase against the floor beside the nearest bed. A large swathe of the blanket catches immediately.
"Fucking mages," Tirena hisses while she pushes away from the table to swing a kick at Adrasteia's legs.
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Maybe it would have been worth catching on fire if he'd been able to pin Caladrius, but alas.
"Damn it," is pitched loud, as Ellis comes back up off his knees.
Caught between leaving Caladrius or tending to the fire, Ellis decides—
To make another go at knocking the rest of Caladrius' teeth out.
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The impact has her reeling, vision going sideways, but battle experience and practice have her crouched almost immediately, staff out in front of her, waiting for Tirena to make another attempt at... something.
Also, the bed is on fire. Or at least the blankets are. That elicits a "Shit!" out of Adrasteia who is much too close to the burning furniture, thanks.
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Also, consciousness.
Tirena has no way to know this, except perhaps by judging from his silence and the absence of any further fire (or ice, or lightning, because why wouldn't he make this worse in new and exciting ways if he could) erupting from where he's pinned by Ellis. But she's fed up enough to be willing to cut her losses, either way.
She throws her dagger at Adrasteia, with a professional's ease but not much precision. It's meant less to kill than to keep the elf dodging long enough for her to swing around, grab a wooden chair, and throw it at her as well.
Then she's darting for the window, past the flaming bed and Ellis and Cal, willing to dive head-first if she has to.
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If Ellis steps directly on Caladrius as he attempts a full on tackle on his fleeing accomplice, surely it's only a coincidence.
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The spirit blade dissipates after a final swipe, and Adrasteia puts her staff up in front of her arms to knock the chair aside. It mostly works.
She's definitely got a concussion though, so. Good times had by all.
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She changes course as quickly as she can. Which is not quickly enough. But her twisting, skidding slide means only her legs are in Ellis' path, rather than her entire body, and she goes down flat on the floor instead of hitting the wall or the window sill. Immediately she's struggling—struggling to free a leg to fulfill the dream of kicking Ellis in the face, struggling to free a second blade from where it's strapped to her hip—with the urgency of someone who expects to die shortly.
The fire on the bed crawls toward the headboard and the walls.
Caladrius emerges from his blackout in time to turn his head, choking and gurling blood until he can breathe again, too dazed to do much else.
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But it's not enough to dislodge him. It is enough to keep him from reeling her in, so he just remains an obstacle, preventing her from standing.
"Adrasteia!" comes as a bellow, aware of the gurgling that heralds Caladrius' potential return to the brawl.
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Ellis' yell has her turning fast enough to make bile rise in her throat (head injuries, yay) and while she doesn't know what she could immediately do with the kicking and bleeding whirlwind that is Tirena on the floor, she knows what to do with a man coming to who might complicate matters; she crosses the small space and hits him, square in the jaw, with the end of her staff before he can completely rouse, putting a knee on his chest to keep him there.
Then she throws Tirena's blade back at her, aiming for her shoulder.
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But Tirena isn't far behind anymore, when her lost dagger embeds into her shoulder—the shoulder she needed for her other blade, specifically. It skitters across the floor like a noisy metal spider, just further than she can reach when she tries twisting to grab it.
The attempt squeezes more blood out of her wounds, and it's finally pain she can't block out. She exhales and lies flat for a moment, takes a deep breath, and looks toward the light in the room. The fire, threatening now to catch the wooden headboard, a side table. The mattress aflame. If it falls it might catch the floorboards, and if Adrasteia knows the wrong bag of magic tricks to stop a fire, then there's a glimmer hope for all of them dying here together instead of only her and stupid stupid Caladrius.
So she resumes putting up a squirming, clawing, increasingly blood-soaked fight—not with any hope of getting free of Ellis, so much as hope of not letting him have a moment to turn his attention elsewhere.
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And it works, because Ellis isn't letting go of her. Pinning her might be a near-impossibility, but letting her escape gets them no answers, sets them up for a second attempt at whatever they'd been trying to accomplish.
"Can you put this out?" is a wasted question, shouted through a mess of blood. What he's really considering is the likelihood of getting the pair of them out. Below them, screams and clattering signals the rest of the inn fleeing, and if either of them had any sense they'd join them, and yet—
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There's no rescuing that mattress, not really, or the blankets and sheets that were on it; the bedframe is singed in places that means it probably will need replacing, and the wall is still smoking a little, but considering the fact that they're all alive and not currently on fire she'll take it.
She'll also just. Throw up in a corner quietly when her spinning head refuses to stop said spinning.
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The relative quiet—relative due to the noise below and outside, as people panic and rush around, and whatever quiet sounds Adrasteia's concussed nausea might be causing in the corner—is shattered by the door rattling, then a fist pounding on it.
"Hé!" That's Orlesian for hey. "Fire!"
Someone's just letting them know.
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The yelling at the door is more or less ignored.
"Are you alright?" is very much for Adrastiea. Tirena is clearly fine, or fine enough to have put up an irritating, exhausting fight.
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The door rattles again and she yells out "Nous sommes bien ici!" before groaning and peering at Ellis from across the room. "How's your nose?"
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But Ellis declines to admit it, instead asking, "Can toss me the rope out of my pack, please?"
Presuming she does, he'll bind Tirena's hands first before using the rest of it to deal with Caladrius.
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Adrasteia picks up the knife from the floor and removes the one from Tirena's shoulder with a tsk, wiping it on the ruined bedspread. She does not offer to do anything for the bleeding, instead gesturing towards Ellis. "Do you want me to heal it?" She imagines he'll turn her down, but.
She's asking anyway.
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It's still too far to reach. It doesn't come any closer while her hands are bound.
Caladrius doesn't stir until it's too late for him to resist the ropes, and then it's only to groan and spit congealing blood, with so little force that it only flops out of his mouth and slides down his chin.
For him and that pathetic attempt, Tirena musters up the will to speak again, Tevinter accent on full display now that she's moving past curses and monosyllables: "What is even the point of you?"
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"Make sure they'll live first," he tells her. "The Scoutmaster and the Commander will want to speak with them."
And Ellis' nose will keep. It's been broken before, and repaired before, and has come out well enough.
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Either way. She puts the knives away, first, and then reaches out a hand to Tirena's shoulder, breathing deeply as the knife wound knits itself together beneath her touch. She doesn't heal it enough to do much more than stop the bleeding and clear any infection from the wound, so it's still going to hurt quite a bit. Plus she'll have trouble using it for a while.
Caladrius' injuries are a little more complex. She's not going to regrow his teeth, and his jaw is still... a mess of pain, but she also stops his bleeding and aligns the bones for the slow process of healing properly.
She puts a hand on Ellis' shoulder when she has to climb to her feet again to keep herself from toppling over. Her head is still spinning a bit, and it's not something she can do anything about except wait it out.
She won't address the break in his nose directly, but she does what she can to take the pain away in the few seconds they have contact. Side effects might include a lowering in the swelling in his hands as well.
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“I think,” Caladrius says, sounding congested and reasonable, “we should—“
Tirena snaps, “Shut up,” and he does.
For a moment, at least. It’s less obedience than a pause to see if she has more to contribute before he says, reproachfully, “This was your idea,” in a tone that really means, stop being mean to me.
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"You should sit, Adrasteia," Ellis tells her. It's the kind of suggestion that is actually an order. She's hurt and there's not much Ellis can do for her, but if she collapses it will be bad for them both.
To Tirena, Ellis directs, "Your idea to ambush in the night, or to follow us in the first place?"
Presumably the former, and someone directed them to engage in the latter. He's obligated to ask, but doesn't expect much of an answer. Interrogation is for others more skilled than him. Toting the pair of them back to Kirkwall will be inconvenient, but what's the alternative?
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She's trying to sort out the logistics of taking the pair with them. Probably tied to horses; two riders per horse is doable, especially given Adrasteia's Avvar horse, but that is too close quarters most likely. The woman will pose a problem no matter how they do it, she's certain of it.
Caladrius gets a tight-lipped smile as Adrasteia begins the process of taking the braids she'd slept in down. It's something to do with her hands, to pull her attention from the dull pain in her head, and she's not feeling overly friendly at this exact moment.
illegal thread for adrasteia.
"Did you hear of any Wardens near Courciennes?" he says, breaking the silence at last.
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"They didn't even manage to kill any of the darkspawn, the village had been so taken by surprise."
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"At Holmfirth, the only ones who survived were children," he begins, brow furrowed as he looks into the fire. "The eldest is the one who told me what happened."
That, in and of itself, was a terrible thing. The only good fortune was that the children had family, that they wouldn't be alone. But still—
"She said something that I've not been able to stop thinking of."
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Still. Children are a tender place for Adrasteia, and she murmurs 'Maker's breath' under her own. Hands him a bowl and waits to see what he'll say, what this child had communicated to him.
It'll be nothing good, she's sure of it.
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It's a hard thing to live with.
But then, Ellis goes on, quieter, "She told me she saw a Warden. At first, what she was telling me sounded as if they were doing as they were meant to. But some of it..."
A shake of his head. The bowl is tipped in one hand.
"It didn't sound right."
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Keeping her hands busy also means not simply staring at him as he determines what information to share with her, and how, so she has to look up again when he speaks.
"Tell me." What he means, what he was told. She can handle it. Perhaps they can figure it out together.
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"She was only a wee little thing," Ellis says first, words coming slowly, dropping like stones between them. "Scared to death and pretending otherwise."
A fact that's stuck in his mind, for so many reasons. This small girl, scared of him, scared of what she was trying to remember, squaring her jaw to bite out answers to questions Ellis was sorry to ask.
"Some of what she said made it sound as if the Warden were cooperating with the darkspawn," Ellis continues. His gaze has dropped to his hands, thumb working over his palm, the bent fingers of his hand. "But I couldn't tell if that's a true thing, or if it's an impression that came out of fear and confusion. At a point, I couldn't press her for anything else. You understand."
They're Wardens. They know exactly what it is to talk to people too shell-shocked by what they've survived to speak of it clearly, or at length.
And this had been a little girl.
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"I don't think we can risk the possibility that what she saw and tried to communicate with you wasn't real." She takes her own teacup between both hands and blows on the surface of her tea. "Not after everything else we've been dealing with, here."
A sigh and she takes a sip. "There were three of them, in Vitroluçon. Two elves and a human, I think; a letter in poorly written Tevinter that the Lady d'Asgard translated as apologizing for what was happening to the people there. A Warden turned against our side is not an unreasonable consideration."
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Even without the letter, with only what they know of what has become of certain factions of Wardens—
"The Wardens were apologizing?" he asks first, then tacks on, "Was it addressed?"
Is it a more welcome subject? The diversion away from three children who had survived something horrible to instead consider some new atrocity from which no one might manage to escape alive?
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Adrasteia takes a breath. "It wasn't addressed, it was left behind to be found. I don't think the elves who were there want to be involved in this, but I don't think they have much of a choice, either." Then, a sip of tea.
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All these people, gone. Ruined. Dead.
Ellis is quiet for a long stretch after that, watching the fire. The tea is still warm, but he doesn't sip it. He is thinking of what he and Richard have been haphazardly collecting. Of what might become of that. Of what Ellis will need to do, where he will need to go. He will need to make the arrangements for that soon.
"Would they talk to us, if we could find them?"
A no wouldn't surprise him.
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"I don't know. I'd like to imagine they would, but there's no way to be certain."
After all, the letter wasn't a call for help, exactly. More of an apology, and a means of finding the person who'd been leading the matter, she thinks.
"I think, if we were to try, we'd have to get them away from the human they're with first."