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The wolf pup is winning, and Sal’enasal will not stand for it.
She has been chasing him the length of the north terraces since midday—a half-grown grey thing with too-big feet and an insulting turn of speed, one of the season’s litter from the pack that dens in the old collapsed rotunda. He is faster than her. He is not smarter than her, and this is the only reason the contest remains close, because Sal’enasal has spent the last quarter-hour herding him toward the dead-end of a fallen archway with the patience of a much older hunter, and he has not noticed yet, and any moment now—
The pup bolts left, the wrong way, exactly where she wanted him, and she is already moving to cut him off, bare feet sure on the cracked mosaic underfoot, when a voice carries up from somewhere below the terrace.
“Fenlin!”
She does not stop. Stopping is for people who have not nearly cornered a wolf.
The terraces she runs are not the ruins they were. She is ten years old and she has never known them any other way, but the elders speak of it sometimes—how all of this was rubble when they came, when the People came, toppled towers and choked fountains and a thousand years of forest swallowing the bones of the old city whole. It does not look swallowed now. The People have spent her whole lifetime and more digging Arlathan back up into the light: the great spiraling stair rebuilt stone by stone, the aqueducts running clear again, gardens terraced down the hillsides where once there was only ruin. Eluvians stand upright and gleaming along the stretch of the upper platform of the great hall. Halla graze the reclaimed meadows. Aravels cluster in the valleys below alongside houses of grown stone and living wood, because some of the clans have stopped only passing through and started, cautiously, to stay. It is not The Place of Their People. Babae says that often, and always a little sadly, and she does not fully understand the sadness yet. But it is theirs, and it is alive, and it is the only home she has ever had.
“Da'len! Your mamae calls for you!”
That one she hears—Master Falon, the loremaster, red in the face and waving from the lower path—but she dismisses it away as information rather than instruction and keeps running, because the pup has just made his second mistake of the afternoon.
Sal'enasal corners him against the fallen arch. He wheels, ears flat, and she drops to a crouch and holds out one still hand, and for a long breathless moment the two of them regard each other: the small girl and the small wolf, neither quite willing to yield. Then the pup’s tail gives one uncertain wag, and Sal’enasal grins, fierce and delighted, and knows she has won.
“Nydha,” she tells him solemnly. Good evening. As if she’d meant to be gracious about it all along.
She is not either of her parents, though the People are forever trying to sort her into one or the other. She has her mother’s coloring gone strange—hair not quite the deep red-brown of Mamae's and not quite the fawn it was as a baby, but some restless in-between that can’t decide, forever escaping whatever braid it’s forced into. She has her father’s stillness when she wants it, that unsettling capacity to go quiet and watchful and old-seeming, there and then gone. She has mamae’s temper and her babae's pride and a quickness that is entirely her own—too fast on her feet, too fast with her tongue, far too clever for the good of anyone tasked with minding her. The elders adore her and despair of her in equal measure. She thinks this is an excellent arrangement and has no wish to change it.
“There you are, you little terror.”
The voice comes from behind her—it is speaking Common, and for a moment the words simply slide off her without catching, as rain runs off oiled leather. Sal’enasal speaks Common. She understands it perfectly well; mamae made certain of that, over her considerable objections. She simply does not like it—an ugly, blunt, crowded language, all edges and no music, and she sees no reason to speak in it when there is the People's tongue to speak in instead. So it takes her a beat longer than it should to turn, and to place the shape of the sentence, and to realize it was aimed at her.
There is a woman on the path she does not know immediately.
Old—old the way the shemlen get old, which still startles her a little, how fast it happens to them. Silver threaded thick through dark hair pulled back from a face lined deep with weather and years. She stands like a soldier even now, straight-backed, though there’s a stiffness in one shoulder she carries carefully, and a scar along her jaw gone pale and old. She is looking at Sal’enasal with an expression the girl can’t quite read—something wide open and a little wounded, like the sight of her hurts and heals at once.
“Maker,” the woman says, softer, mostly to herself. There is a tenderness that feels familiar in her expression, but not one Sal'enasal yields to. It is followed closely by an exhale that lends to exasperation. “You’re the very image of your father. Blessed Andraste, that’s his look exactly, that expression. I’d have known you anywhere.”
Sal’enasal considers her. She does not answer in Common, on principle.
“Ma halam ban’din,” she informs the stranger loftily—you’ve interrupted a hunt—and the woman’s weathered face breaks into a startled, delighted laugh, rusty, as though laughing is a thing she does less than she used to.
“She doesn’t speak Common to strangers.” A second voice, a man’s, ambling up the path behind the first. Him she looks at longer, because while he is no stranger to her, he is still strange—short, far shorter than the People she’s grown up among, broad and solid and gone soft and round at the middle with age, his hair and beard both shot grey-white now, though something in his face stays stubbornly amused. Varric walks with a cane he clearly resents. Sal'enasal's eyes catch it, mind sparking with the idea to snatch it later on. “Won’t speak it to friends either, from what I hear. Or her own mother half the time.” He grins up at her, entirely unbothered by her scrutiny. “How ya doin', Fenlin? Giving your mom hell, I hope.”
Fenlin. That, at least, she’ll answer to. She narrows her eyes at Varric, this odd round grey dwarf, trying to draw herself bigger than all ten of her years.
They are here for the feast. She knows this, but will not concede ground to them. This is the People's place, and she and her pup it's guard.
“You knew my parents,” she says—in the People's tongue still, but slower; so a slow Common-speaker might follow the shape of it. “Before. In the human war. The one nobody will tell me all of.”
“Pup,” Varric says, and something moves behind his eyes, fond and sad and amused all at once, “I am the one who’s going to tell you all of it. Eventually. When you’re old enough, and your mother’s not in earshot to correct the good parts.” He leans on the cane and looks at her, this child of two people he’d plainly never in his wildest imaginings expected to see become anyone’s parents, and shakes his head slowly. “You wound me. Can't believe this is how you treat your uncle. That old warhorse is Cassandra. And we have come an extremely long way, on some extremely bad knees, to meet you and drink your father’s wine and embarrass your mother with stories. So.” He tips his head toward the upper terraces, toward home, toward the distant sound of her mother’s voice still calling her name into the golden evening. “What do you say you let us walk you back? Before Kara sends the whole forest out looking.”
Kara. The name catches Sal’enasal’s ear, and she turns it over, curious. Nobody calls her mother that. Not here. Among the People she is Ghirara—her true name, her soul-name, the one she went by long ago before the shemlen mangled it into something else—or, when the elders forget themselves, which is often, she is Atish’lea, spoken low and reverent, and mamae’s whole face goes tired every single time it happens. Only these old friends, the ones from before, still call her by the shemlen name.
It is like a password, Sal’enasal decides. A little key to a locked room she has never been allowed to see inside of. She stores it away with everything else she is collecting about these strange, ancient, short-lived people who love her mother.
Sal’enasal looks at the old woman who stands like a soldier, and the dwarf she has known since as far as her mind can reach back, and thinks about the war nobody finishes telling her about, and the friends her parents speak of sometimes with faraway faces—the ones from the life that came before her, the life she was born at the very end of, when the world was ending and then, somehow, wasn’t.
Somewhere far away, the elders whisper of things stirring again at the edges of the world. She has heard them, when they think she isn’t listening—worried talk of old wounds not fully healed, of something waking in the deep places. But mamae only shakes her head when it comes up, and babae only says, not ours to carry this time, vhenan, and neither of them looks afraid. The world has other guardians now. It is allowed, at last, to be someone else’s turn.
Tonight there is only this: a caught wolf, and a red sky, and two old heroes come impossibly far to meet her.
“Ma nuvenin,” she says—as you wish—and then, grudgingly, in the blunt ugly borrowed tongue, because her mother raised her with manners even if she pretends otherwise: “…Fine. This way. Don’t be slow.”
She leads them home, up through the reclaimed and shining ruins of Arlathan, the wolf pup trotting at her heels like he’s decided he belongs to her now—which, of course, he has. They always do.
The path climbs, and the two old friends climb it slowly, and Sal’enasal is forced against every instinct in her body to slow down and let them keep pace. They pass People along the way—coming down from the terraced gardens, carrying water, mending a wall—and every one of them lifts a hand or bows a head as she goes by.
“Fenlin,” they murmur. “Andaran atish’an, Fenlin.”
Varric notices. He notices everything, she is beginning to suspect. “They all call you that these days, huh,” he says. “Little wolf. Thought that was just Cassandra and me getting to be friendly. Bet your mom is real happy about that one.”
“It’s my name.” She considers how to explain it to a Common-speaker, and settles on the simplest version. “My real name is mine. And my parents’. And the Keeper’s. Nobody else says it, except on the naming-nights.” She wrinkles her nose. “So the People call me Fenlin instead. All of them. It is the way of things.” She says it matter-of-factly, as if this small and unremarkable fact should be paramount to these visitors who do not understand she is grown now. Grown enough for a bow. Grown enough to be called Fenlin without the diminutive addition. “It’s a thing of respect. Because of my father. What he is. They don’t say that out loud either, so they say little wolf and bow, and mean the other thing by it.”
Something crosses the old woman’s weathered face—Cassandra’s, she reminds herself, filing the name where it belongs. “And your mother dislikes it,” Cassandra says. Not a question. There’s an old, knowing weariness in it—she has had this exact argument herself once, about a different title, a very long time ago.
“She hates it.” For the first time Sal’enasal grins at one of them without reservation, because here at last is common ground. “She says nobody should bow to a ten-year-old who can’t even remember to come home for supper. She says it every time. It doesn’t help. They still bow.” She shrugs, philosophical about the whole business. “She hates being bowed to worse. So I think she’s given up trying to fix mine until she’s fixed her own, and she is never going to fix her own, so.”
“No,” Varric agrees, something rueful and fond in it. “No, she never is. Believe me, kid. People have tried.”
The dwarf walks slowly, and Sal’enasal has to keep making herself walk slowly with him.
It is not his fault. He tells her so himself twice, at some length, with a great deal about his knees in it. She has decided she likes how he complains, which is not really complaining at all but something closer to a performance he is giving her for free. The tall woman with the scar—Cassandra—says nothing about her own pace, and does not need to. She climbs the terrace stair with more discipline than Sal’enasal thought the shemlen capable of.
The pup comes with them. He walks at Sal’enasal’s heel now, close enough that his shoulder knocks her leg on the turns. When she stops he stops, and when she goes he goes, and she has not once had to call him. She had spent four days chasing this animal. She had cornered him properly at the last, exactly as she meant to, and he had looked at her out of the dead end of the fallen archway with his ears flat and his tail low, then simply come to her, and that was that. She had earned him.
Sal’enasal takes them the long way up on purpose, because the long way goes past the good things.
She shows them the spiral stair where the veilfire runs blue in the grooves of the balustrade all the way to the top. She shows them the aqueduct where the water comes out of the mountain and falls the height of nine men into the basin, and waits with her chin up while they look at it. She shows them the terrace gardens stepping down the hillside, and the eluvian standing at the crossroads with the evening in it, and the great hall’s outer wall where the People have got the old carving three-quarters of the way back and the new stone is still a shade paler than the old.
Cassandra stops at that wall for longer than at anything else.
“This was rubble,” she says. Not to Sal’enasal. “I stood here. There was nothing. There was a hill with stones in it.”
“It’s not a hill now,” Sal’enasal says.
“No,” the woman agrees. “It is not.”
The dwarf has stopped a few paces back, and he is not looking at the wall. He is looking up the terraces at the whole of it—the lit windows, the lamps coming on in the gardens, the smoke going up straight in the still evening from a hundred hearths—and his face is doing something complicated that Sal’enasal, watching him sidelong, notes it away and does not ask about.
Then he says, “Huh,” very quietly, and starts walking again.
They come up over the last rise, and home opens out before them.
It is not a palace. Her mother would not have a palace; the one time the People tried to build her one she made them turn the stone to a library instead. It is a house of pale grown wood and old restored stone, terraced into the hillside among gardens gone wild and lovely, an Eluvian glinting at the threshold, the whole of it wrapped in the deep green hush of the forest her father loves. Warm light spills from the windows. Woodsmoke rises. And in the doorway, silhouetted against the glow, one hand already lifted against the dusk to search the stairs for a daughter who is late for supper again—
Her mother.
Ghirara Enasalis Lavellan looks much as she has looked all of Sal’enasal’s life, because the People do not age as shemlen do and her mother, these days, ages slower even than that—a thing nobody speaks of directly. It is another locked room, another password Sal’enasal has not yet been given. One arm lifted to shade her eyes. The other ending, as it always has, above the elbow, the old loss she has never hidden and never explained beyond I gave it to close the sky, da’len, and I would give it again. She is not tall. She is not armored. She does not look, standing in her doorway in the last light with flour on her sleeves, like anything the stories say she is.
Then mamae spots them on the rise—her daughter, and the wolf pup, and two figures she has not laid eyes on in several long years—and her whole face changes, and she comes down the path at a run, and for a moment she is not mamae, she is not Atish’lea, and she is not Ghirara.
She is just Kara. Running to her friends.
Her mother comes down it fast, in the long grey house-robe she wears when she has been working, with her hair half out of its binding and her one hand already lifting—and Sal’enasal opens her mouth to explain about the pup, and does not get to.
Because her mother goes straight past her.
“You are early,” her mother says, in Common, and it comes out of her in a voice Sal’enasal has never heard, cracked in the middle. “You said the ninth. You wrote the ninth—”
“We made good time,” says the woman with the scar.
“You did not make three days of good time, you lied to me so I wouldn’t stand at the gate—”
“Yes,” Cassandra doesn’t bother with pretenses. The word comes with a smile far too easy for her face.
And Mamae makes a sound that is not a word at all and takes hold of her, hard, with her one arm—and the tall grim woman who climbed the stair like a punishment gets both arms round Sal’enasal’s mother and holds on, and neither of them says anything for long enough that Sal’enasal begins to feel she should look somewhere else.
Then Varric says, “Hey, Charming,” and her mother lets go of the woman and looks down at him, and her face does something Sal’enasal has never once seen it do.
“Don’t,” her mother says.
“Don’t what?”
“You know what.”
“I’ve been walking uphill for two hours—”
“Varric.”
“—on knees, I might add, that have been bad longer than this kid has been alive—”
Her mother crouches down and puts her arm round him, and the dwarf pats her back twice, awkwardly, and says something too low for Sal’enasal to hear.
“I know,” her mother says. “I know. Me too.”
Sal’enasal stands on the stair with her wolf and watches.
She is aware, distantly, of being annoyed. She has brought these people up the stair herself. She found them, or they found her, which is nearly the same and would have been entirely the same in the telling. She has been rehearsing the entrance all the way up. And she has been comprehensively forgotten inside of nine seconds.
But that is not what is holding her still.
What is holding her still is Charming. And Kara before that, down on the low terrace, in the dwarf’s mouth, easy as anything.
Nobody calls her mother Kara. Nobody has ever called her mother Kara. Her mother is Ghirara, and to the People at large she is Atish’lea, and Sal’enasal has heard those two names her whole life and no others. And here is a stranger with bad knees calling her something else entirely, and her mother answering to it, not correcting him, and not even seeming to notice that it happened.
There is a whole person standing on that stair that Sal’enasal has never met, shaped like mamae, but not.
Babae comes out at the top, near home.
He does not hurry. He stands in the doorway with the light behind him and watches the reunion happening on his stair with an expression of mild patience, and Sal’enasal, who has been reading his face for the whole of her life and can generally get about a third of it, cannot tell what he is thinking at all.
“Chuckles,” the dwarf says, straightening up.
“Master Tethras.”
“Four years.”
“Five,” Babae corrects, chin lifting the faintest of fractions.
“See, that’s what I like about you. Nobody else keeps score that petty.” The dwarf is grinning as he climbs the last steps. “You look exactly the same. It’s insulting. I want you to know it’s insulting.”
“I am aware.”
“Cassandra’s gone grey. I’ve gone round—”
“Varric,” warns Cassandra.
“—and this one hasn’t so much as creased,” the dwarf finishes, jabbing a thumb, and Babae’s mouth moves a fraction. It is not quite a smile. He steps back from the door and holds it, and they go in.