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Elissa watches as Duncan walks away among the hubbub of the Ostagar camp. He takes Koli with him, and when the large mabari throws her one last mournful look and disappears behind soldiers’ legs, her heart gives a sudden, painful squeeze. She nearly runs forward, nearly calls him back to her side…
But she is a teyrn’s daughter, and she doesn’t move. She swallows back the hard lump of loneliness in her throat and squares her shoulders.
Koli is all that remains of her home… but home is gone, and she has to get used to that. Oh sure, King Cailan himself looked her in the eyes and promised that her family would be avenged, the castle retaken. But it won’t bring back her parents. It won’t bring back Oriana and Oren. Even should she find her brother tomorrow, Highever will never be the same.
Anyway, she’s to become a Grey Warden; she no longer has use for a home.
But she is still her father’s daughter, and when she finally moves she does so with dignity and confidence, strangling her inner turmoil to silence. Duncan has given her a task. She has a Grey Warden to find, and she may as well take the opportunity to familiarize herself with the camp. Keeping herself busy: that’s the best way she has found to keep the grief at bay.
She’s barely been at it for ten minutes when she’s just about bowled over by a familiar and furiously barking lump of fur.
“Woah!” she exclaims, arms pinwheeling in a bid to keep herself upright. “Down, boy! What’s with you?”
Koli hops around, never for one second letting up the racket. She worries, but he doesn’t look injured. If anything, he’s more excited than she’s seen him since Highever, big brown eyes shining and tongue lolling.
A man runs up to her.
“He’s yours?” he pants. “We tried to keep him by the fire, but he wouldn’t listen. Sniffed everywhere and then bolted. Duncan said to make sure he wasn’t going to run into trouble.”
“He’s mine,” she assures, kneeling to get Koli to quiet down before he annoys the soldiers surrounding them into unpleasantness. “Sorry you had to run after him. I don’t know why he’s acting like this.”
“Eh,” he shrugs, and though he looks unimpressed, he doesn’t pursue the matter. “So you’re the last recruit, right? The one we’ve been waiting for, for the Joining?”
“Yes. You’re a Grey Warden recruit too?”
“Looks like it. Name’s Daveth.”
They make small talk for a bit, but Koli is getting more and more impatient, and eventually she has to excuse herself.
“That’s rude,” she berates him, but he clearly doesn’t care one whit, bounding forward and stopping a few feet away to look back at her with insistence. He wants her to follow.
What could have got him so worked up? Could it be that he has found Fergus?
A bright flame of hope rises within her, to be extinguished just as quick.
No, the King said her brother is out on scouting duty. He can’t be in the camp. Still, maybe Koli found his tent, or some Highever soldiers who didn’t go with him? Neither possibility appeals very much.
The dog won’t be swayed, though, and she follows with reluctance, stopping here and there to observe the armory or ask a passing soldier if they have seen a Grey Warden around.
What she finds instead are the mabari pens. She thinks for a moment that this is where Koli was leading her, after all, but he bypasses them completely. She sighs, but makes the detour herself. She loves mabaris—what Fereldan doesn’t?—and she can’t think of a better way to lift her spirits than to watch them for a few minutes.
She’s in the middle of a conversation about a sick dog with the kennel master when Koli, clearly done with her dallying around, whines and tugs at the scabbard of her sword. He then proceeds to evade all her attempts to get him to stay put.
“I’m sorry,” she says, mortified. “He’s usually better behaved than this, I swear. I don’t know what’s happening with him today. Koli, stop it.”
“Hmm,” the kennel master says, looking her dog up and down with experienced eyes. “Beg your pardon, but you wouldn’t happen to have found your Promise, have you?”
She freezes in the middle of tugging her glove out of Koli’s mouth. Her heart skips a beat, then doubles its rhythm.
Her Promise, she thinks with a twinge of hysteria.
When she was a teenager, it was all she could think about. When she was a teenager, she would have given anything to see Koli suddenly leap at a stranger, barking like a dog possessed.
When she was a teenager, she would have understood in a second what Koli was trying to tell her.
Mabari are Ferelden’s prized jewels, the apple of every free man and woman’s eyes. Resilient, fiercely loyal, clever enough to speak but wise enough not to. Other nations smile in disdain at hearing those proud words in a Fereldan’s mouth, but the smiles turn to jeers when one dares to add: and none knows your heart as well as your mabari.
But what the world dismisses as superstition, Ferelden knows to be true. If you are worthy enough to bond with a mabari, it is a promise that the dog makes to you: that there will come a day when he will lead you to the other half of your soul.
Somewhere in Thedas, there is a person who completes you under the eyes of the Maker, and the mabari can lead you to them. Every Fereldan child knows this, and never mind the Chantry grumbling about barbaric legends.
And like every Fereldan child, she listened with wide eyes and wondered. She was still a little girl when Koli chose her, and not too taken with silly ideas like romance. But she thought the other half of her soul sounded like a grand person to have as a friend, and so she made them up in her head, made list of things they would have to be (kind, funny, brave) or things they would have to like (dogs; also swords). They would be her best friend, she decided, and together they’d have wild adventures all over Thedas. Then she grew up and words like “handsome” joined the rest.
And she grew up still, and suddenly there wasn’t much time left for lists. So many things to learn, etiquette and politics and riding and swordsmanship, so many responsibilities she tried hard to shoulder so her father would be proud of her. Until she was a woman and she wasn’t thinking so hard about it. It would come if it had to come, she thought. It would come if it was the Maker’s will.
But she never stopped hoping.
And to have this offered to her, today of all days, when the wound of everything she has lost is still fresh in her heart… it feels too good to be true, this incredible boon.
Koli is still now, looking up at her with so much joy, panting in sheer delight that she finally understands.
Tears try to well up in her eyes. She bats them away furiously, takes a deep breath. She takes her leave from the kennel master, who grunts with something like empathy and turns away.
“Alright Koli,” she says when she can be sure her voice won’t shake too much. “I’m following.”
He takes off like a shot, not needing any more incentive. She has to run to keep up with him, but she doesn’t mind. It’s liberating, even with her armor weighing down her limbs and her shield clanking against her back. It burns off the worst of the razor-sharp edge of anticipation in her chest, stills the nervous shakes of her hands. She feels like she’s flying, flying to something that has been a long time coming, a promise finally fulfilled.
Koli barrels up a flight of stairs and she catches up with him just in time to grab him by the collar. It’s a dead end and there are only two men here. It has to be one of them.
Her stomach twists. She feels all at once sick and elated.
The two men are talking—arguing? Arguing. One is a mage, if she’s to believe his robes, and older than her. He’s also the loudest. She hasn’t really thought about her Promise being a mage. She has never met one before, seeing as most of them live in the Circle Tower. She supposes it wouldn’t really be a problem for her, except that it would make spending time together difficult. And she’s going to be a Grey Warden, too. How is she ever going to get to know her Promise if she’s moving all over the country fighting darkspawn?
She pushes the issue to the back of her mind for now. All other considerations aside, she hopes the mage is not the one. He’s… blustery. The other man, though…
Oh. Well.
“And I thought we were going along so well,” he’s saying, warm brown eyes crinkling in humor. “I was going to name one of my children after you! The grumpy one.”
“Enough! Out of my way, you fool,” the mage growls.
He stomps away, crossing paths with her. Koli doesn’t turn and remains stubbornly straining forward, tongue lolling in excitement. Her heart makes a good attempt to leap out of her chest.
Her Promise turns towards her.
“You know, one good thing about the Blight is how it brings people together,” he says, smiling, like they’re already friends and joking together is a perfectly normal part of their day.
She knows then that she’s already in too deep, but she can’t do a thing to slow her fall. She’s plummeting down and it’s never felt so exhilarating.
“You don’t say,” she manages to answer, manages to smile back, but even to her, her voice sounds tremulous.
He turns concerned.
“Are you okay? You look a little bit pale… Although that might be the dust, I swear you breathe more of it than air in this place, part of the old ruins charm—”
The collar slips out of her hand. She doesn’t do much of an effort to hold on to it and so Koli bounds forward, barking a booming greeting and rising on his hind legs so he can smack both paws against the man’s chainmail.
“Woah!” he says, staggering but hands lifting automatically to steady the dog, and if he gets any more perfect she might have to check that she’s awake and not dreaming all of this. “Hello there?”
Koli barks again and accepts a timid scratch behind his ears. He’s not quite tall enough to reach his poor victim’s face and give it a thorough welcoming, so he jumps back down and runs ecstatic circles around him instead.
“Err… He is… Is he… usually this friendly?”
The man looks confused, but there is a touch of tension in his eyes when he looks at her, and she can tell he already has an inkling of what’s happening. She steps up to him, feeling irresistibly drawn. Koli stops running to press himself against the back of her legs, as if encouraging her to get even closer.
“No.”
That’s all she can find in herself to say, but there’s a smile on her face, gentle and nervous and she thinks she might be blushing. He is definitely blushing.
“Oh. Well. Ah. I… Hello? I mean— hi? I mean— Maker,” finally explodes out of him. “How do I do this?”
She giggles, can’t help it, and it’s the first laugh that has left her lips since Highever. He smiles back, sheepish.
“Are you sure… I mean, is he really…”
He waves a flailing hand at Koli, who looks unimpressed.
“Well, if he isn’t, someone has vastly overrated the mabari’s superiority.”
“Never,” he says, making ridiculously offended eyes at her. “Blasphemy.”
“I know!” she agrees. “Let us never speak of this again.”
And then they are both laughing and it feels so good, so freeing, she is quite certain she never wants to stop.
“I— I’m Alistair,” he says when they eventually have to catch their breaths.
“Oh!” she blurts out in realization. “I was looking for you! I mean… well, yes, I was looking for you in the metaphorical sense, in the sense that I was waiting to meet you what feels like my whole life,” she amends, notes with interest that this makes his blush deepen and his mouth flap around useless words. “But also in the much more immediate sense that Duncan sent me to find you.”
This brings him short in confusion.
“Duncan?... Oh! Duncan. You’re the new recruit!”
“That’s me. I’m Elissa.”
“Elissa…”
There is a strange look on his face now, halfway between delight and fear.
“Are you okay?” she asks, worried.
“No. Yes! Well… You’re going to be a Grey Warden, which is… wonderful. Only… you know. There is the slight problem of the Joining.”
“Is it really so dangerous?”
“Normally this is the point where I say not to worry, really, worrying is not going to do you much good. But it’s quite obvious I am worried, so… not helping my case, here. Please don’t ask me about it?”
She has no choice but to smile, utterly charmed.
“Fine,” she concedes. “How about we get this underway so we can both stop worrying sooner, then?”
“Excellent plan,” he says, brightening. “Yes, let’s go find Duncan.”
They walk side by side, Koli prancing behind them looking proud as anything. He’s going to be insufferable, but she can’t bring herself to do anything other than grin at him.
The Joining is, to say the least, unpleasant.
She comes back to herself with a roiling stomach and nearly groans, but stops herself when she realizes she’s lying on something too hard to be her bed and she has no idea where she is.
Adrenaline floods her, but only for as long as it takes her to recognize an already beloved voice nearby.
“Come on big guy! Please don’t hate me?”
The disorientation clears, though the nausea does not. She squints her eyes open against the light of the campfire. Alistair is squatting by Koli, trying to bribe him with smoked meat. The mabari ignores him, clearly in a huff.
“It’s not my fault, though,” Alistair sighed. “I could have told her not to do it, but would she have listened? You weren’t there when ser Jory tried to keep her away from the fight back in the swamps, you know. I mean, I’m not used to fighting alongside women, I’ll admit that. So here I am, wondering if I was supposed to step in before Jory did and kind of maybe panicking that I already dropped the ball, and she just lets Jory do his thing polite as you please, but by the time the fight is done the other two realize twice as many darkspawns had been sneaking up on us from behind and she’s already wiped them down.”
Alistair sighs happily. She can’t see his face, but whatever expression he’s sporting is enough to convince Koli he’s thoroughly distracted. He snatches the meat from his fingers and gobbles it up, looking smug.
“Uh!” Alistair says, staring at his empty hands.
“You’re going to be such a pushover,” she laments, but she’s grinning.
He starts and rushes to her side.
“You’re awake! How are you feeling? Need to puke?”
“Ugh, don’t talk to me about puking.”
She sits up, cradling her stomach.
“Right right, sorry. Here, water should help.”
He hands her a water skin, and though she has her doubts, she decides he must be talking from experience.
“Hey, the new girl is awake,” an unknown voice calls as she’s drinking. “You could have warned us, Alistair!”
Three men dressed in the Grey Wardens colors join them around the fire, smiling.
“She just woke up,” Alistair protests. “Don’t crowd her, you bunch of dunderheads.”
“Aww, our baby boy is being all manly and protective,” a second man teases. “Want to keep her to yourself, Alistair? That’s not fair.”
Alistair splutters, reddening once more. Having finished his snack, Koli comes up to knock him over on his ass. Alistair goes with a thump and Koli sprawls over both his lap and Elissa’s. He gives a big toothy grin to the newcomers, as if saying “look what I’ve found!” The Wardens’ eyebrows rise.
Duncan had given them the same surprised look when they had first come up to him, chatting away like old friends with the mabari prancing at their heels. His had held a measure of wariness, though. Elissa hadn’t blamed him. He’s their commanding officer, it’s expected that he would think of the ramifications of this before anything else.
But the men mostly look delighted by the potential for endless ribbing, and so she feels at ease enough to give a dramatic groan.
“Nooo, not my stomach. Away, you big lout!”
She pushes at his flank until Koli deigns to step away, letting her breathe. She smiles at her new colleagues.
“Are you boys going to introduce yourself?”
They laugh and sit around the fire. Before long she’s engrossed in conversation with cheerful Leneth, clever Vane and Jean of the great booming laugh. They tease Alistair like a little brother and he takes it with relative good grace. He seems embarrassed that she’s hearing this, but if anything she finds it endearing.
“I’d warn you about Alistair’s morning breath, Elissa,” Jean says, “but you’re Fereldan. I guess you’re used to it.”
“No dog jabs!” Alistair protests as the other two roar with laughter. “No dog jabs in Ferelden, I told you already!”
Elissa turns to Koli.
“Sit,” she says, pointing at Jean.
The mabari barks an agreement and leaps at the Warden, pushing him down. He then proceeds to lie down on his face, panting in happiness.
“Mercy,” Jean splutters as dog hair gets in his mouth. “Mercy!”
“No dog jabs in Ferelden,” she seconds firmly.
“I swear!”
Her mother would be appalled at her behavior, she thinks with a pang. But she spent too much time with the guards back in Highever to turn her nose up at soldier banter. And as she calls Koli back, she thinks it feels good to face the Wardens’ new respect for her. They no longer dance around her being a woman after that.
As for Alistair, he looks at her like she hung the moon just for him.
For the first time since Highever, she feels warm. She will always be her father’s daughter, but she is a Grey Warden now. And she may just have found a new home.
She’s not meant, it seems, to keep a home.
Alistair is sitting on a rock by the water. His back is to her, but once again she doesn’t need to see his face to have an inkling of the expression he wears. His arms are thrown around Koli’s neck, his nose pressed in the dog’s fur. Koli stands obligingly still, whining softly.
She wrings her hands together, shifting from one bare foot to another in front of the small hut Morrigan and her mother share. Koli notices her. His ears perk up and his big brown eyes plead at her to do something.
Alistair doesn’t react until she sits next to him. Then his head snaps up. His eyes rove over her face and her heart gives a twinge at how red they are. Relief softens every line of his body.
“You are alright. Thank the Maker, if I had lost you too…”
He cuts himself off, just now realizing her appearance. She’s not wearing much, having only thrown on her undershirt before rushing out when Morrigan finished summarizing the events of Ostagar for her. The vestment is scandalously short, but for him, she doesn’t care. There are much more important things at stake, here.
But Alistair is frozen, clearly not knowing what to make of her in her present state. She takes pity on him and cups the back of his head, drawing his face down to press against her shoulder. She takes his hands in hers. Now blind, he sinks into her warmth.
“You heard?” he says, voice shaking.
“Morrigan told me.”
“Gone. All of them. I can’t believe it…”
She thinks of Leneth, of Vane, of Jean. She thinks of kind and stern Duncan. The tears come unbidden.
How many more deaths must she witness? How many more people must she lose? How much more betrayal before it’s enough?
Anger burns in her chest. Loghain is just as vile as the man who stabbed her father in the back, if not even more so. At least Howe’s greed didn’t put the entire country in jeopardy. Loghain let all of Ferelden at the mercy of hordes of darkspawn to sit on the throne he endangered. What senseless folly!
And the Grey Wardens…
“We’re the only two left,” she says, numb.
Alistair is crying on her shoulder. He clutches her hands tighter.
The only two left, she repeats to herself, and the weight of the words would make her knees buckle if she was standing. The only two left against what might very well be a Blight. A baby Grey Warden who’s yet to learn how to walk and a grief-stricken, barely older one.
She gulps. They need to do something. It falls on them to save Ferelden from the darkspawn. It’s their purpose. But the task is daunting.
She wants to ask Alistair what they should do, where they should start. But the words don’t come. She meets Koli’s eyes. The mabari is looking at her, expectant.
He knows what she does. The Promise goes both ways. If Alistair is what she needs, then the reverse is just as true.
And right now, she knows deep in her bones that he needs her. He cannot bear the weight of this. His pain is too great, and he’s not ready. In many ways, Alistair still has the heart of a child. She loves him for it, but he cannot lead them where they need to go. Asking it of him would break him.
So, she will lead. For him, she will be strong. She will be indomitable.
It’s all right. She is a teyrn’s daughter.