WHO: Bastien, Derrica, Marcus, Richard Dickerson WHAT: In search of Madame Fitcher, Marcus and friends find their missing Head Healer instead. WHEN: mumble WHERE: A few days ride out from Kirkwall along the coast towards Ostwick. NOTES: Pending.
The horse and rider approaching on the road ahead have stopped, reined up short to stand with uncertainty in their own dust. This close to the coast, the night breeze blowing in from the Waking Sea is sharp with salt, the sun fresh set over the horizon, plenty of color left in the sky.
Unusually for the hour and this far out from any city, this rider is alone, the horse beneath him bulky with gear. He’s lean at a distance, wind-whipped, bearded.
Nervousness translates through a toss at the tail, an unprompted sinking and step of the beast’s weight back beneath him.
Silas nudges her back into a walk.
Just another weary traveler weighing out the odds of a highway robbery. Nothing to scrutinize here.
The three figures far up the road could be just about anyone in the slowly diminishing light. The one that's moved up ahead of the other two is not in tidy Riftwatch uniform, anyway. Layers of fur-edged leather are warm against the startlingly chill wind coming off the water to their right, buckles jangling, light armor that speaks of no allegiance at all, more commonly the sort you might peel off the body of an apostate.
Hooves pick slow over the stony, sandy road. They don't speed up at the sight of someone up ahead, nor do they halt, but Marcus keeps his focus forward and alert. The horse he's wrangled from the stables bobs his head restlessly at the scent of someone new, grey-speckled ears forward.
And then he springs to life when Marcus nudges him with his heels, and again, sharper, breaking into a faster gait to close the distance. No warning given.
In fairness, all Derrica wears of her uniform is the pin affixed to the loose flutter of her tunic. She has been quiet in the course of this journey, attentive to both Marcus and Bastien's reactions and tempers, but holding her own in check. At the sight of this rider, she looks over to Bastien immediately, before following Marcus' response.
Dulcinea is a sweet-tempered mare, responds obligingly to the encouraging dig of Derrica's heels and click of her tongue. Marcus is moving faster and so Derrica means to match that pace.
It's only that she means to be on hand, in the event that this meeting on the road does not play out so amicably.
Bastien's horse (white spotted liberally with distinctive black spots, feisty for a gelding, a biter) would prefer not to linger. It takes some rein-tugging and negotiating noises to keep him from racing after Marcus and his horse, more to keep him from trying to outrun Derrica and hers, but Bastien holds him at the rear.
He's here to watch. He knows that. To help with the tracking, maybe, if it's needed, but mostly to be a witness everyone would hopefully prefer not to murder to cover anything else up.
The rider they're approaching isn't Fitcher. He's not much more worried about violence at the moment than he is on any given day in Lowtown. But that's still worried. He waits until there's some distance—enough to see what happens before he's in the middle of it, enough to cut wide around them if necessary—before he lets Vascal speed up.
It’s clear Serrah Silas has been intercepted while traveling before.
He guides his mount to a neater stop in the center of the road and waits. A keen eye might catch the pass of his hand across the back of his seat while he quiets a sidestep from the mare beneath him -- idle precaution while he still has the time and distance to take it.
The shadow of a hawk fleets long across the hard-packed ground between here and there.
Doctor Dickerson is scruffier than any of them might recall, but the beak of his nose and the blue of his eyes are the same, the damp flap of his tunic streaked and discolored. His horse is wet too, the ruddy mottle of her pelt thick with sweat. It holds the five-fingered shape of Dickerson’s hand where he’d reached down to reassure her.
Neither of them looks pleased by the prospect of this company.
The lively stride of the big workhorse Marcus is riding clatters through the peace. His focus is keenly forward—enough not to mark the flight of a hawk, but he does catch the disappearance of a hand. His own hands stay on the reins, but the angled blade of the iron-edged staff lashed across his back is well in view.
Rather than halt at some polite conversational range, Marcus spurs his horse on, angling off to move past Richard, road dust raised in the clamour. Several feet behind, he hauls on the reins to both stop and pivot his mount. Surrounding him, inasmuch as three people can, when one is taking his time bringing up the rear.
Richard has no basis of comparison as to Marcus now and the unsteady, bruised-over version of himself climbing out of a prisoner transport weeks back. He is much healed since then, but there's still a hard-edged, latently hostile quality to the scrape of his evaluation of the rifter-healer on his horse that was honed at that time.
"What happened?" is quiet, temper more like a hand on a hilt rather than wielded.
There is no following question from Derrica, clucking her tongue again in soft encouragement as she guides Dulcinea forward to loop towards one side. She wouldn't have thought Richard the type to run, but she hadn't expected many things of her fellow Riftwatch agents before these past few weeks.
Her expression is very solemn. All Richard's rundown misery has not gone unnoticed, but Derrica doesn't swing out of the saddle to minister to him. Not yet.
When Bastien come to a stop ahead of Richard, it's slightly to the opposite side of Derrica, but more of a nod to the concept of surrounding him than an actual attempt. Noting how tired the horse looks doesn't encourage him to put more effort into it. His head leans to one side; his eyes search, from the gear loading down the horse to the expression on Richard's face.
The silent question in the furrow of his eyebrows and worried eyes is only a more specific version of Marcus'. Despite everything, he hopes Fitcher is alive.
There’s no movement from Dick or his horse to turn when they’re passed, or surrounded. Stirred dust cakes in their sweat, stifling the sickly sheen they share. The horse’s ears lay flat; Richard is socketed dark around the eyes, drawn and pale under the disorder of his toilette. His left hand, save the forefinger he has looped through the reins, stays curled close at his thigh.
Bastien is in front of him. Coincidentally, he’s also the easiest in this group for him to look back at.
“Madame Fitcher fled to Ostwick and from there to parts unknown.”
As if he’s been asked to report in on the day’s weather.
The dagger at the back of his belt is long and straight, the leather latch that keeps it secure freshly unfastened. The rest of his gear is for camping. There’s a set of mage armor fastened into the mix.
swiftly aimed from behind and trampling over the natural pause that would have occurred, and delivered more of a bark this time, impatience grinding his mood to sharper edges,
"that prevented you from reporting in?"
Richard is haggard, pale, exhausted in the way Marcus has seen men behave when concealing injury. Healing, he knows, is a drain on one's resources, and so maybe, perhaps, etc. He hasn't forgotten that this rifter is himself a mage, and so he asks the question, instead of deciding the answer.
"Richard," comes very softly, as Dulcinea dances a little side-step in the road. It's a small plea, for something plausible. A good reason for so long a silence.
Nothing follows. There is no reason to undercut Marcus.
The unimpressed look Bastien cuts past Richard at Marcus might be undercutting, slightly. So might the relief transparent in his deflating exhale after Richard's confirmation that Fitcher is not dead somewhere.
But he doesn't say anything. His horse moves restlessly beneath him, but his hoof-shifting only moves him a few inches before Bastien calms him back into stillness.
Richard looks from Bastien to Derrica at the sound of his name, softly spoken, fox in a catchpole weighing the leverage of a new voice. Her presence in this posse is a surprise. His recollection of dream events is sharp enough yet that it probably shouldn’t be.
They’ll both see the broken glass glitter of him clicking his way through the tumblers of how to make this worse.
Marcus does not see the fine manifestations of this thought process. He is watching, too intently, the slope of Richard's shoulders, the movements of his hands, to clock Bastien's disapproving tip towards him. He spares a look towards Derrica to divine some meaning, there,
but there are meanings he can fill in. He shares his life with a rifter, knows the calculations she makes about how long away she can travel when duty takes her further afield than the rest of the company.
"And coming back was no choice at all," he says, in case Bastien and Derrica make the mistake of straying towards more generous interpretations of Richard's appearance on the road. "Your dagger. Remove it, drop it."
Why blooms across Derrica's expression, even if it doesn't reach her lips.
Disappointed. She is disappointed, made more so by what Marcus reminds them: Richard couldn't stay away forever unless he were to part with a limb.
But she doesn't want this to be anymore damning than a man hoping the best of his friend. Mourning her, maybe. Had he searched this whole time for her? Had he wanted everything to be different?
Derrica looks to Bastien, then to Marcus, before tacking on quietly, "If you're hurt, please tell me."
Not that she expects Richard to be overly eager to volunteer anything in present circumstances.
Now Bastien is equally as unimpressed with Richard as with Marcus before, but that doesn't make it past the filter to his face. A head tilt does, at the unexpected answer—not the substance of it, but that it's the best Richard is choosing to offer—as well as an eye-narrowing curiosity. But he doesn't ask. He doesn't say anything, because nothing he could say would be important enough to delay compliance with Marcus' order or an answer to Derrica's question.
He only coaxes his horse closer, alongside Richard's, until the gap between them is short enough he can reach a hand out to await the dagger.
The more this circle closes in, the more tension coils into Mr. Dickerson’s shoulders, tendon and gristle twisting taut against bone. Hard to say if he clocked that sigh of relief, seconds ago; Derrica’s disappointment he sizes up and shakes off without an answer past a tinge of poison to his look. He’s the very picture of health and how dare she suggest otherwise.
“This is a dangerous position for you to be in,” Richard tells Bastien in clipped Orlesian, barely a mutter as he eases the dagger from its sheath. He smells about the way you’d expect.
“Your guard captain won’t even get close.”
He offers it out pommel first once it’s free. The tremor buzzing through his wrist behind the weight of it is beyond his control.
Bastien accepts it with a tight smile and no obvious glances wristward. He's good with his peripheral vision.
Options include: He doesn't have to, or Derrica is fast with a barrier, or I'm not fully convinced you want to hurt anyone, or wow, your accent is good. The option he chooses is, "I'm not very smart."
At the moment it might be true.
While he passes the dagger to his far hand he looks at Marcus with some vague hint of apology for the exchange he may or may not understand—a look Derrica is not included in only for her position on Richard's far side—and a stronger hint of a smile (still tight, unhappy with the entire situation) that means it's nothing to worry about. Probably.
Marcus is already wound tense and so to say there is some change in status there when Bastien moves in close would be incorrect. He does, however, reach back to grip his staff, watching this exchange with the icy appraisal of someone who is not as confident as Bastien is that Richard does not want to hurt anyone.
Not particularly afraid for the possibility, but unwilling not to be ready to act in the event that it manifests.
Orlesian muttering is frowned at. No comprehension, from him. The look that angles his way is met with an expectation of, perhaps, more than a hint of a smile, mute for a moment before speaking again. "Only two of us need double back with him," he says, speaking past Richard now to look from Bastien to Derrica, "and the other go on ahead to spare their horse some harder riding before we catch back up.
"Or we take him with us," lands more coldly somewhere at the centre of Richard's shoulderblades. "Have him retrace his steps."
The option that they all go back together feels like slipping backwards, even with a snake caught in their fangs, but the option is plainly there.
Dickerson processes what is most assuredly an open threat from Marcus without shifting in his saddle, running numbers on how this team is likely to vote if he sits in silence. Derrica is certainly a no --
Derrica's agreement snags a wilder glance out of him, anything he might’ve said back to Bastien fumbled into a harder reframe of his current reality. His ears ring. A nervous grumble from his horse muffles under the clicking of her bit.
Being impudent now requires a level of composure he’s seldom pressed to summon, here.
“I could ride back to the Gallows alone.”
It’d sound harder without the shake in his breath when he suggests it.
Bastien hesitates before he says, "No," to that idea, with the uncertain air of someone who is trying to decide whether or not someone else is trying to be funny. To the other idea: "He's in pain."
Like Marcus said, he's coming back at all because he no longer had a choice.
"If he comes to Ostwick with us it's going to get worse. We could see if a couple of the griffon riders could meet us partway on the road back."
Richard's clear flash of fear and Bastien's simple denial don't move Marcus, when both were expected. Aimed for, even. It's Derrica's easy and trusting agreement, the plain desire she has for Dickerson to save himself, that has him steer a glance to her and feel some splash of ill-ease. Guilt, we could call it.
"His horse needs rest," he says, without apparent irony. "And we should speak with the Scoutmaster."
The jangle of leather and metal signals Marcus dismounting, the crunch of his boots on pebbled road. Regardless as to how they proceed, Dickerson has surrendered himself as something subordinate to a trusted member of Riftwatch, and Marcus crosses the short distance from his own horse to Richard's.
He wraps a gloved hand around the roan's bridle, steering a look up at Richard that allows more study of his countenance than he's previously had. No pity, there, but grudging assessment all the same, and on his part, resentment polished raw.
There is nothing satisfactory about any of this. A light pressure of her heels spurs Dulcinea a few steps forward, repositioning to keep Richard more clearly in her eyeline.
She wants to trust him. But good sense says that he is cornered and without any good options, and with that set against all other emotions to hand, Derrica is wary of how much potential there is for this meeting to go sideways. Even so close to a resolution. Even with Richard lacking anywhere else to go.
And she is silent. Watchful. Whether they do as Bastien suggests or return, that changes nothing about how attentive she must be in this moment on the off chance someone makes a reckless decision.
He’s haggard, exhausted, increasingly filthy in this roadkill veil of damp and dust. His glance to Bastien is uncertain, unsure what to make of his casting here as good cop. A little suspicious.
There is trace gratitude, also.
His compliance is slow and stiff, hindered by the inoperable claw of his left hand and the bandy-legged reluctance of muscle and bone to hold his weight after so many hours spent in the saddle. He clings to it to stop himself buckling over into the dirt, shuffling fresh dust loose in the process, leery of the nearness of Marcus and the free hand he still has.
He doesn’t have to say don’t touch me to buzz with rattlesnake warning in the way he coils in on himself while testing his own weight.
Bastien has to twist halfway around to observe what is happening on the other side of Richard’s horse, and then not much of it. The moment he tries anyway nearly strains a muscle in his side. In the next he’s urging his horse forward, past Richard’s, looping behind Marcus’, and coming to a stop a polite-horse distance from Derrica’s.
He’s watching Marcus and Richard with unbroken attention, while he leans backwards to tuck the dagger into a saddle bag. No concern that Marcus will do any harm, the way he might to Fitcher. It’s only interest in the particulars of the interaction, signs of guilt or innocence, evidence of who either or both of these men really are.
He’s watching them, but he’s sighing to Derrica: “I really wanted to surprise her.”
Not with a furious, personally-wronged mage, in an ideal world. Ideal would be a friendly chat where the evidence was slowly laid out to form the unmistakable shape of it was YOU. But he’d have made due.
Marcus steps back, hand still holding onto bridle, watching Richard's movements. Tense, ready, but less because he is expecting some kind of attack and more than he expects Richard might simply slip out of the saddle completely, and he'll have to move fast to stop him from cracking his skull open on the road. This doesn't prove necessary, so Marcus just gives him a more thorough once-over, eyeing the dip of his shoulders and the way he holds his arm.
And the leeriness, the defensive coiling. As though he was wronged, of the two of them. Marcus' regard is flatly unimpressed, unmoved, and he turns his back on him in the next moment to lead the horse some paces away.
"If you're going to see to him," he says, aimed at Derrica, "you should check for weapons."
Once slightly off the road, Marcus begins the process of going through all items buckled and strapped to the saddle, a first pass for weapons as implied, and then more thorough, jaw set haughty. Maybe there'll be some kind of sad love letter or something that Richard didn't think to discard, he doesn't know.
Bastien's sighing nets him a look of real sympathy. Derrica sways in the saddle, far enough to reach out and squeeze his arm. Yes, she knows.
It would have been satisfying to surprise her. But whatever Derrica feels regarding Fitcher, it can't compare to Marcus, who was dealt real harm by her. It won't compare to Bastien, or to Richard, who counted her as a friend.
"We might still manage it," is soft, for Bastien only, before Derrica swings out of the saddle.
Every line of Richard's body telegraphs how absolutely opposed he is to the idea of being touched. It's why Derrica appeals, rather than simply reaches out:
"Will you let me help?"
She absolutely does not believe that Richard would hurt her. If that turns out to be wrong, well—
Dick watches Marcus lead his horse away from him like a house spider shaken out of a boot. Exposed, suddenly, in the middle of this road between the three of them. Elbows tucked, eyes flashing faint in the waning light, he nurses the futile hope that his horse-shaped boot will be searched and returned for him to crawl back into.
Onto.
“I’m not injured.”
He hears himself say so while he’s still watching Marcus work, preoccupied not just with the stripped-wire incandescence of raw nerves but the very real possibility that there might be something for any of them to find in their respective searches. It’s been days since he culled his belongings for travel.
Whether it's possible for healing magic to take the edge off of anchor pain—
That is something for the people with healing magic and anchor pain to figure out, probably. Bastien looks between Derrica and Richard with the obvious energy of someone holding back from asking questions about things that don't concern him before he slides out of the saddle, too.
For a moment he holds the reins. Are they trusting the horses not to bolt? Does he trust his horse not to bolt? It sort of feels like he has to, now, or else he'll make him look back in front of the other horses.
He lowers them delicately rather than dropping them. Maybe Vascal won't realize he's free.
On his way to Marcus, he cuts a wide berth around Richard, uninterested in adding to the tension in his shoulders. And he gives Marcus space, too, when he comes to a stop.
"If she is any good at what she does," he says, meaning she is, obviously, "we might have more luck pressing the Chantry to answer for her than finding her ourselves now."
If Marcus is aware of Richard's focus boring through the back of him, it's not something that compels him to hesitate, or treat the other man's belongings any differently. Once he has felt around for hidden sheaths, he opens saddlebags, pawing through. Anything of no clear relevance to him—pouches of herbs, some coin, camping supplies—are merely handled and put back.
Once Bastien has made his way over, Marcus has retrieved a journal, which he thumbs open, frowning over it. Pinned between his hand and the cover is a folded map.
Closes it, when Bastien speaks up. Kind of bends the book and map both into a cylinder in his hand as he goes about fussing with the reins, flipping them over the horse's head. Taking his time in answering, the jangle of leather and metal filling in some silence. "Luck is what we'd need," he states, finally, "in compelling the Chantry to answer for anything."
Even obliged to look for weapons, Derrica still hesitates over the prospect of putting hands on him without express permission.
"Let me try," she appeals, equally uncertain as to whether or not any magic of hers can ease whatever pain he's carrying.
Near enough to hear Bastien and Marcus' exchange, Derrica doesn't offer any interjection. She is unwavering in her focus on Richard, even if the sentiment Marcus expresses gathers tension in the set of her jaw, the way she holds her body. Tightening, holding some quiet anger in check.
Derrica has smelled worse from Dick Dickerson than she does now: between a near literal bloodbath in Antiva and the grisly stink of burnt flesh Brother Gideon left on him, horselather and unwashed researcher are near candle-worthy by comparison.
Still.
He is unhappy and closed and prickles like a cornered animal when she speaks to him, watching Bastien join Marcus, hairline fractures of impatience for the kindness on offer. The coastal wind is sharp too now that he’s off his horse, sweat clinging cold through dust and cloth.
“Please.”
Sounds like if you must. It’s marginally more polite.
If Bastien is aware of or particularly concerned by Derrica's new tension and Richard's brittle misery, in the way of a spy whose life and livelihood relied on noticing an involuntary glance or a breath held too long in his periphery, there's no sign of it. He looks at them, but he does it with the blunt appraisal of someone worried about someone's suffering, curious about another's magic.
To Marcus he says, "No one likes to be caught with their spy down an ally's trousers," thick Orlesian accent making the phrasing somehow both more refined and more obscene. "If they authorized what she did to you and l'enchanteur—of course they will say they did not, but they might give something up to prove it."
He holds out a hand for the journal Marcus is holding onto, with the question mark in his eyebrows. He does not especially expect it to be handed to him.
Because Marcus doesn't. Instead, without missing a beat, he bundles the reins of Richard's horse for better gripping and places it without ceremony into Bastien's outstretched hand. The absence of calculation indicates it's a fairly honest mistake that he doesn't expect to be corrected.
But he is thinking of what is being said to him, not difficult to read in that moment, his silence in doing so. Dissatisfied, inevitably.
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Unusually for the hour and this far out from any city, this rider is alone, the horse beneath him bulky with gear. He’s lean at a distance, wind-whipped, bearded.
Nervousness translates through a toss at the tail, an unprompted sinking and step of the beast’s weight back beneath him.
Silas nudges her back into a walk.
Just another weary traveler weighing out the odds of a highway robbery. Nothing to scrutinize here.
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Hooves pick slow over the stony, sandy road. They don't speed up at the sight of someone up ahead, nor do they halt, but Marcus keeps his focus forward and alert. The horse he's wrangled from the stables bobs his head restlessly at the scent of someone new, grey-speckled ears forward.
And then he springs to life when Marcus nudges him with his heels, and again, sharper, breaking into a faster gait to close the distance. No warning given.
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Dulcinea is a sweet-tempered mare, responds obligingly to the encouraging dig of Derrica's heels and click of her tongue. Marcus is moving faster and so Derrica means to match that pace.
It's only that she means to be on hand, in the event that this meeting on the road does not play out so amicably.
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He's here to watch. He knows that. To help with the tracking, maybe, if it's needed, but mostly to be a witness everyone would hopefully prefer not to murder to cover anything else up.
The rider they're approaching isn't Fitcher. He's not much more worried about violence at the moment than he is on any given day in Lowtown. But that's still worried. He waits until there's some distance—enough to see what happens before he's in the middle of it, enough to cut wide around them if necessary—before he lets Vascal speed up.
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It’s clear Serrah Silas has been intercepted while traveling before.
He guides his mount to a neater stop in the center of the road and waits. A keen eye might catch the pass of his hand across the back of his seat while he quiets a sidestep from the mare beneath him -- idle precaution while he still has the time and distance to take it.
The shadow of a hawk fleets long across the hard-packed ground between here and there.
Doctor Dickerson is scruffier than any of them might recall, but the beak of his nose and the blue of his eyes are the same, the damp flap of his tunic streaked and discolored. His horse is wet too, the ruddy mottle of her pelt thick with sweat. It holds the five-fingered shape of Dickerson’s hand where he’d reached down to reassure her.
Neither of them looks pleased by the prospect of this company.
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Rather than halt at some polite conversational range, Marcus spurs his horse on, angling off to move past Richard, road dust raised in the clamour. Several feet behind, he hauls on the reins to both stop and pivot his mount. Surrounding him, inasmuch as three people can, when one is taking his time bringing up the rear.
Richard has no basis of comparison as to Marcus now and the unsteady, bruised-over version of himself climbing out of a prisoner transport weeks back. He is much healed since then, but there's still a hard-edged, latently hostile quality to the scrape of his evaluation of the rifter-healer on his horse that was honed at that time.
"What happened?" is quiet, temper more like a hand on a hilt rather than wielded.
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Her expression is very solemn. All Richard's rundown misery has not gone unnoticed, but Derrica doesn't swing out of the saddle to minister to him. Not yet.
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The silent question in the furrow of his eyebrows and worried eyes is only a more specific version of Marcus'. Despite everything, he hopes Fitcher is alive.
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Bastien is in front of him. Coincidentally, he’s also the easiest in this group for him to look back at.
“Madame Fitcher fled to Ostwick and from there to parts unknown.”
As if he’s been asked to report in on the day’s weather.
The dagger at the back of his belt is long and straight, the leather latch that keeps it secure freshly unfastened. The rest of his gear is for camping. There’s a set of mage armor fastened into the mix.
He doesn’t carry a staff.
“I’m returning to the Gallows.”
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swiftly aimed from behind and trampling over the natural pause that would have occurred, and delivered more of a bark this time, impatience grinding his mood to sharper edges,
"that prevented you from reporting in?"
Richard is haggard, pale, exhausted in the way Marcus has seen men behave when concealing injury. Healing, he knows, is a drain on one's resources, and so maybe, perhaps, etc. He hasn't forgotten that this rifter is himself a mage, and so he asks the question, instead of deciding the answer.
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Nothing follows. There is no reason to undercut Marcus.
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But he doesn't say anything. His horse moves restlessly beneath him, but his hoof-shifting only moves him a few inches before Bastien calms him back into stillness.
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They’ll both see the broken glass glitter of him clicking his way through the tumblers of how to make this worse.
But it’s a quick thing.
“I chose not to report in.”
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but there are meanings he can fill in. He shares his life with a rifter, knows the calculations she makes about how long away she can travel when duty takes her further afield than the rest of the company.
"And coming back was no choice at all," he says, in case Bastien and Derrica make the mistake of straying towards more generous interpretations of Richard's appearance on the road. "Your dagger. Remove it, drop it."
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Disappointed. She is disappointed, made more so by what Marcus reminds them: Richard couldn't stay away forever unless he were to part with a limb.
But she doesn't want this to be anymore damning than a man hoping the best of his friend. Mourning her, maybe. Had he searched this whole time for her? Had he wanted everything to be different?
Derrica looks to Bastien, then to Marcus, before tacking on quietly, "If you're hurt, please tell me."
Not that she expects Richard to be overly eager to volunteer anything in present circumstances.
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He only coaxes his horse closer, alongside Richard's, until the gap between them is short enough he can reach a hand out to await the dagger.
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“This is a dangerous position for you to be in,” Richard tells Bastien in clipped Orlesian, barely a mutter as he eases the dagger from its sheath. He smells about the way you’d expect.
“Your guard captain won’t even get close.”
He offers it out pommel first once it’s free. The tremor buzzing through his wrist behind the weight of it is beyond his control.
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Options include: He doesn't have to, or Derrica is fast with a barrier, or I'm not fully convinced you want to hurt anyone, or wow, your accent is good. The option he chooses is, "I'm not very smart."
At the moment it might be true.
While he passes the dagger to his far hand he looks at Marcus with some vague hint of apology for the exchange he may or may not understand—a look Derrica is not included in only for her position on Richard's far side—and a stronger hint of a smile (still tight, unhappy with the entire situation) that means it's nothing to worry about. Probably.
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Not particularly afraid for the possibility, but unwilling not to be ready to act in the event that it manifests.
Orlesian muttering is frowned at. No comprehension, from him. The look that angles his way is met with an expectation of, perhaps, more than a hint of a smile, mute for a moment before speaking again. "Only two of us need double back with him," he says, speaking past Richard now to look from Bastien to Derrica, "and the other go on ahead to spare their horse some harder riding before we catch back up.
"Or we take him with us," lands more coldly somewhere at the centre of Richard's shoulderblades. "Have him retrace his steps."
The option that they all go back together feels like slipping backwards, even with a snake caught in their fangs, but the option is plainly there.
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Derrica looks to Bastien. The urge to draw him back is also present.
"We should go altogether," she presses. "If he will take us."
Laying out an opportunity for Richard. Here, show us where was last searched. Show us where she might have gone.
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Derrica's agreement snags a wilder glance out of him, anything he might’ve said back to Bastien fumbled into a harder reframe of his current reality. His ears ring. A nervous grumble from his horse muffles under the clicking of her bit.
Being impudent now requires a level of composure he’s seldom pressed to summon, here.
“I could ride back to the Gallows alone.”
It’d sound harder without the shake in his breath when he suggests it.
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Like Marcus said, he's coming back at all because he no longer had a choice.
"If he comes to Ostwick with us it's going to get worse. We could see if a couple of the griffon riders could meet us partway on the road back."
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"His horse needs rest," he says, without apparent irony. "And we should speak with the Scoutmaster."
The jangle of leather and metal signals Marcus dismounting, the crunch of his boots on pebbled road. Regardless as to how they proceed, Dickerson has surrendered himself as something subordinate to a trusted member of Riftwatch, and Marcus crosses the short distance from his own horse to Richard's.
He wraps a gloved hand around the roan's bridle, steering a look up at Richard that allows more study of his countenance than he's previously had. No pity, there, but grudging assessment all the same, and on his part, resentment polished raw.
"Off," he says.
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She wants to trust him. But good sense says that he is cornered and without any good options, and with that set against all other emotions to hand, Derrica is wary of how much potential there is for this meeting to go sideways. Even so close to a resolution. Even with Richard lacking anywhere else to go.
And she is silent. Watchful. Whether they do as Bastien suggests or return, that changes nothing about how attentive she must be in this moment on the off chance someone makes a reckless decision.
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There is trace gratitude, also.
His compliance is slow and stiff, hindered by the inoperable claw of his left hand and the bandy-legged reluctance of muscle and bone to hold his weight after so many hours spent in the saddle. He clings to it to stop himself buckling over into the dirt, shuffling fresh dust loose in the process, leery of the nearness of Marcus and the free hand he still has.
He doesn’t have to say don’t touch me to buzz with rattlesnake warning in the way he coils in on himself while testing his own weight.
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He’s watching Marcus and Richard with unbroken attention, while he leans backwards to tuck the dagger into a saddle bag. No concern that Marcus will do any harm, the way he might to Fitcher. It’s only interest in the particulars of the interaction, signs of guilt or innocence, evidence of who either or both of these men really are.
He’s watching them, but he’s sighing to Derrica: “I really wanted to surprise her.”
Not with a furious, personally-wronged mage, in an ideal world. Ideal would be a friendly chat where the evidence was slowly laid out to form the unmistakable shape of it was YOU. But he’d have made due.
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And the leeriness, the defensive coiling. As though he was wronged, of the two of them. Marcus' regard is flatly unimpressed, unmoved, and he turns his back on him in the next moment to lead the horse some paces away.
"If you're going to see to him," he says, aimed at Derrica, "you should check for weapons."
Once slightly off the road, Marcus begins the process of going through all items buckled and strapped to the saddle, a first pass for weapons as implied, and then more thorough, jaw set haughty. Maybe there'll be some kind of sad love letter or something that Richard didn't think to discard, he doesn't know.
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It would have been satisfying to surprise her. But whatever Derrica feels regarding Fitcher, it can't compare to Marcus, who was dealt real harm by her. It won't compare to Bastien, or to Richard, who counted her as a friend.
"We might still manage it," is soft, for Bastien only, before Derrica swings out of the saddle.
Every line of Richard's body telegraphs how absolutely opposed he is to the idea of being touched. It's why Derrica appeals, rather than simply reaches out:
"Will you let me help?"
She absolutely does not believe that Richard would hurt her. If that turns out to be wrong, well—
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Onto.
“I’m not injured.”
He hears himself say so while he’s still watching Marcus work, preoccupied not just with the stripped-wire incandescence of raw nerves but the very real possibility that there might be something for any of them to find in their respective searches. It’s been days since he culled his belongings for travel.
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That is something for the people with healing magic and anchor pain to figure out, probably. Bastien looks between Derrica and Richard with the obvious energy of someone holding back from asking questions about things that don't concern him before he slides out of the saddle, too.
For a moment he holds the reins. Are they trusting the horses not to bolt? Does he trust his horse not to bolt? It sort of feels like he has to, now, or else he'll make him look back in front of the other horses.
He lowers them delicately rather than dropping them. Maybe Vascal won't realize he's free.
On his way to Marcus, he cuts a wide berth around Richard, uninterested in adding to the tension in his shoulders. And he gives Marcus space, too, when he comes to a stop.
"If she is any good at what she does," he says, meaning she is, obviously, "we might have more luck pressing the Chantry to answer for her than finding her ourselves now."
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We're in a video game, the horses will respawn.If Marcus is aware of Richard's focus boring through the back of him, it's not something that compels him to hesitate, or treat the other man's belongings any differently. Once he has felt around for hidden sheaths, he opens saddlebags, pawing through. Anything of no clear relevance to him—pouches of herbs, some coin, camping supplies—are merely handled and put back.
Once Bastien has made his way over, Marcus has retrieved a journal, which he thumbs open, frowning over it. Pinned between his hand and the cover is a folded map.
Closes it, when Bastien speaks up. Kind of bends the book and map both into a cylinder in his hand as he goes about fussing with the reins, flipping them over the horse's head. Taking his time in answering, the jangle of leather and metal filling in some silence. "Luck is what we'd need," he states, finally, "in compelling the Chantry to answer for anything."
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Even obliged to look for weapons, Derrica still hesitates over the prospect of putting hands on him without express permission.
"Let me try," she appeals, equally uncertain as to whether or not any magic of hers can ease whatever pain he's carrying.
Near enough to hear Bastien and Marcus' exchange, Derrica doesn't offer any interjection. She is unwavering in her focus on Richard, even if the sentiment Marcus expresses gathers tension in the set of her jaw, the way she holds her body. Tightening, holding some quiet anger in check.
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Still.
He is unhappy and closed and prickles like a cornered animal when she speaks to him, watching Bastien join Marcus, hairline fractures of impatience for the kindness on offer. The coastal wind is sharp too now that he’s off his horse, sweat clinging cold through dust and cloth.
“Please.”
Sounds like if you must. It’s marginally more polite.
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To Marcus he says, "No one likes to be caught with their spy down an ally's trousers," thick Orlesian accent making the phrasing somehow both more refined and more obscene. "If they authorized what she did to you and l'enchanteur—of course they will say they did not, but they might give something up to prove it."
He holds out a hand for the journal Marcus is holding onto, with the question mark in his eyebrows. He does not especially expect it to be handed to him.
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Because Marcus doesn't. Instead, without missing a beat, he bundles the reins of Richard's horse for better gripping and places it without ceremony into Bastien's outstretched hand. The absence of calculation indicates it's a fairly honest mistake that he doesn't expect to be corrected.
But he is thinking of what is being said to him, not difficult to read in that moment, his silence in doing so. Dissatisfied, inevitably.
"What are you proposing?"