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“Herald,” a tiny voice says, somewhere in the vicinity of her left elbow.
Adaar moves her arm and looks down. She recognizes the little Human girl, all unruly hair and wide gray eyes and gap-toothed smile. The girl was already settled into Haven by the time Adaar arrived on Cassandra’s heels; Adaar’s seen her slinking around the tavern, the stables, the Chantry, as her ma adds another pair of healing hands to Mother Giselle’s efforts. She’s lurked at the gate more than once, excitedly waving goodbye to Adaar and her chosen team as they leave the safety of Haven for yet another taxing mission.
(It makes Adaar grin every time—the girl has promise, a natural rogue in the making.)
But now the girl’s ma accompanies her, standing close and quiet. Even though there’s ease, something that miraculously even looks like trust, on the woman’s face and in gray eyes identical to the ones staring up at her now, Adaar still raises her brow in a wordless request for permission.
The woman nods. Adaar kneels, and the top of the girl’s head still only reaches her chin.
“Hello,” Adaar greets, making sure to keep her tone gentle. While the indelicate ringing of her voice serves her well in battle—or against doubting clerics and wayward Lord Seekers—or in the midst of well-meaning but sometimes overbearing advisors—it’s not fit for this. “Is there something I can help you with?”
The girl glances back over her shoulder at her ma, who smiles encouragingly. “Go on.”
“Mistress Herald, do your horns hurt?”
Adaar suppresses the instinctual, bemused laugh that threatens to burst free. “No,” she says, soft and kind. “No more than your little teeth.”
The girl grins, her tongue poking out through the empty space between missing teeth. “They hurt sometimes.”
“You know what?” Adaar faux-whispers. Loud enough for the girl’s ma to hear, quiet enough to make the girl feel like she’s being bestowed a precious secret. “My horns hurt when I was growing, too. Soon you’ll have strong teeth and they won’t hurt anymore.”
“Can I touch them?”
Her ma gasps. “Jia!”
Adaar feels her expression waver a little; she inwardly curses herself for never learning how to properly apply stealth skills to her own face. The woman’s skin flushes bright in obvious mortification, but before she can speak Adaar hastens to reassure: “Thank you for asking, Jia. Yes, you may.”
Small hands, so careful in their wonderment, feel along the ridges along her forehead, poke and prod the smooth, sloping curve and point of her horns. Jia, she commits to memory; there are too many people here to remember every name, even every face, but if she can save at least one person, one soul—
Let it be her, Adaar prays, to the Maker she doesn’t believe in. Let it be her innocence, her courage, her curiosity. Let me save at least that.
Then the hands drop, and Jia giggles. “Thank you, Mistress Herald!” she chirps, skipping away to tangle in her ma’s skirts. Adaar kneels there for a moment, frozen, as the woman begins to lead Jia away, even as Jia chatters about her horns all the while.
“Please,” Adaar calls after a moment, climbing to her feet. A little desperate, openly searching. “I don’t know your name.”
Jia’s mother immediately smiles at her—for once, someone genuinely unafraid of a tall, imposing Qunari. “Maurelyn. Maker watch over you, Herald.”
Adaar swallows around the tightness of her throat as the dinner bell rings out clear across Haven, as Maurelyn and Jia turn away and climb the steps leading to a growing line of refugees gathering in front of the Chantry.
“That was a good thing you did.”
She doesn’t have to look to feel Commander Cullen’s presence by her side, warm and steady and imposing in a way that her training tells her she should despise, but she somehow craves instead. “I would never resent a child’s ignorance. I far prefer it to…”
“Willful ignorance?” he offers, when she trails off. “Tell me, Herald. Do you resent the ignorance of those of us who should have learned better?”
Now she does look at him—the tightening of his grip around the pommel of his sword, the twitch of his other hand like he’s restraining from his usual nervous tic of rubbing the back of his neck, the practiced guard in amber eyes. Cullen is a complicated tangle of hidden doors and secrets tucked in lockboxes, one she itches to unravel—
But not here. Not when it’s clear that he needs something from her, first.
“People can change.” She nearly shrugs her shoulders, but it’s too blasé for what he’s asking, the importance she senses in the spaces around his words. “I have grace for those who have never known differently, or those working earnestly to learn from past mistakes. I am aware that even though I’m Vashoth—I grew up outside the Qun, and have never followed it—I am still and will always be Qunari first to others. All I can do is hope to open even one person’s eyes.”
Cullen is quiet for a moment, staring into the distance, before his expression tightens into some kind of resolve. She watches—because she’s always watching this man more than she should admit—as he squares his shoulders and meets her gaze and says, voice firm, “It is us that should hope for our eyes to open, so that we may beg your forgiveness for being unable to appreciate the glory of the Maker.”
She’s sure the surprise stretches across her face as she gapes at him, speechless. He doesn’t give her the time to respond, to even think, before he bows slightly, cheeks aflame from what looks to be sheepish embarrassment as much as the crisp cold of the Frostbacks. “Good day, Herald.”
Adaar studies his retreat with a searching glance, following the straightness of his posture and the swing of his dark cloak and the dent of booted footprints in fresh snow.
Slowly, she smiles.