Work Text:
9:20 Dragon
Redcliffe Village, the Arling of Redcliffe, Ferelden
“Hey, give that back!” Alistair cried.
“‘Give that back!’” Barty called back in a nasal, whiny voice. He whisked Alistair’s list out of the top of the pack, and tossed Alistair’s pack over to Doran. “Hah!”
“Guys,” Alistair started, looking from the order for the arl’s mason to the pack with the treats for the kennel master, the harnesses for Brinda, and the new dwarven-made bellows for the smith. “Come on.”
“‘Guys, come on,’” Doran mocked, tossing Alistair’s pack over to Kindan as Alistair started toward him. “Too slow, bastard!”
“What’s this, bastard?” Barty demanded, holding the order for the mason high above his head and squinting at it. “Can’t remember your business without some fancy chicken scrawl?”
“He’s too dumb, our ickle Ali. Head full of straw and sawdust,” Kindan suggested.
A couple of the littlest children watching began to chant. “Straw and sawdust, straw and sawdust! His head is full of straw and sawdust!”
It was so silly and stupid, Alistair didn’t want to be embarrassed, but he could feel his face getting hot. “Look, just give me the mason’s orders and the castle supplies. I have to get back.”
“Why?” Doran asked flatly. “No one wants you. No one up at the castle’ll miss you. You can stay and play catch for a little while. Bastard.” He held out his arms, and Kindan tossed the pack back to him. Doran held it out, and Alistair, unbelieving, walked over.
Doran shoved the pack hard into Alistair’s chest. He staggered back, and Doran tossed the bag back over to Barty and punched Alistair viciously in the stomach.
Alistair fell to his knees, winded, sick. He blinked, heard the little kids laughing and cheering. He shook his head, trying to breathe. “Right,” he said, and charged Doran.
Of course, then the other two boys were on him too. But that was how these things went.
Alistair lay on his back in the dust, staring at the clouds in the bright spring sky. His lip was fat and sticky with blood. His entire body was sore, and Kindan had smeared some horse manure in his hair before leaving with all the others. Some flies were buzzing around it now.
It could be worse, he thought. They had left the bag of the things he was supposed to bring back to the castle by him, anyway. He wouldn’t have to come to Redcliffe again for another week or so, probably, and no one did anything too bad to him at the castle. Usually.
“Alistair?”
Great. Now it’s worse. Alistair closed his eyes. He knew that voice. “Let’s play a game,” he said. “Who’s the worst person I could possibly be found by with horse manure in my hair? Hello, Bann Teagan. So glad you’re back to visit. Sorry I’m not bowing. Can we just tell Arl Eamon I showed the proper respect when you came by? After all, I’m not really sure how I could get lower to the ground just this minute.”
“Go on up to the castle, Duncan,” Teagan said quietly. “My brother will make you welcome. I’ll handle this.”
Even better. There was someone with Teagan. Alistair sighed. “As you wish,” a faintly accented voice agreed. “I’ll speak with you both together later.”
“Agreed,” said Teagan. There was a jingle of a harness and the sound of hooves on the road as someone rode away. Then another jingle as someone dismounted. “Alistair.”
Alistair opened his eyes and took the hand Bann Teagan held out to him. He let Teagan pull him to his feet, biting back a groan as he rose. Then he did bow. He looked at the bann’s shiny, perfect boots and scooped up the supply pack off the ground. The order for the mason had been torn into three soggy, grungy pieces and trod into the dirt of the road. Alistair picked them up, trying to decipher what Eamon had written there. Gave it up as a bad job. There went his plan of not coming back to the village for another week.
“Can we just pretend this never happened, milord?” he asked Teagan, shifting the pack on his back. “Can you just go ahead and meet Duncan and my lord and all and wave at me next time you’re out by the stables? Please?” Maker, could a person actually die of embarrassment?
Teagan’s voice was calm when he spoke. “Weren’t two of the little horrors I saw walking off and laughing about this younger brothers to your friend Brinda in the stables?”
Alistair was silent. Barty and Kindan. When he’d first left the servants’ quarters for the loft and got to know Brinda, he had thought she was joking about the nastier tendencies of her little brothers and sisters. The thing was, she probably thought she had been. She would probably apologize for her brothers, if she knew. Or maybe she wouldn’t. Honestly, he didn’t want to know.
Teagan tried again. “What have you got there?”
Alistair hitched the pack up on his back. “Bellows for Master Rory. A few new bridles for Verral. Some treats for Master Olcan, if they weren’t crushed.”
“Hmm. Nothing that won’t wait a few hours to deliver, then? No one who is going to die if we take a short detour to the river and don’t get back right away?”
Alistair tried a smile. “No one’s going to miss me,” he repeated. He dared to look up at Teagan, and found the bann looking down at him intently.
“Well, I would have,” Teagan told him. “The ride up to the village works up a bit of an appetite, you know, but I’m not sure I can eat all the food my cook packed me for lunch, even so. I don’t suppose you could help me out?”
Alistair’s smile turned into something that felt a little less like a fraud. “Maybe.” Teagan smiled back at him, walked back to his horse, Prida, mounted, and held out a hand to pull Alistair up in front of him.
Then Alistair saw the little girl walking with her mother down the street, and staring at him. The errand boy with manure in his hair, talking to the brother of the arl. “Bann Teagan,” he said, looking back at the girl, “I should probably just walk.”
Teagan looked over his shoulder and saw the little girl, who blushed and grinned and whispered something to her mother. He bowed to her and to her mother slightly from the saddle before turning back to Alistair. “If that is what you want,” he said easily.
“It is,” Alistair said, face all hot again. He hitched his pack up again and started walking, and Teagan urged Prida into a walk beside him.
They didn’t talk until they were well up the hill to the castle, out of sight and earshot of the village. The castle gates came into view, but Teagan didn’t say anything when Alistair took a left, walking off the road and upstream toward the woods, until he came to a little falls and a dappled pool of brown, cold water by a grass hillock. The bann just walked Prida right along.
He didn’t say anything while Alistair washed in the pool, cleaning his face and head and hands, shivering as the freezing water penetrated his tunic and beaded on his skin, and gooseflesh broke out all over. But it was better than having manure all over him.
Alistair turned around then to see that Teagan had let Prida loose to graze and had removed her saddlebags. He was laying out a picnic blanket, two wooden plates, and enough cold chicken, bread, and cheese, Alistair’s stomach rumbled. “You were supposed to share that with your friend, weren’t you?” he asked.
“Dera no doubt has something much better than picnic rations for Eamon’s guest,” Teagan said. “But I confess I was hoping to share with a friend today. Would you sit down?”
Alistair sat. His eyes stung, and he blinked them, closed them hard. His throat felt like an apple had caught in it, and he drew his knees up and put his head down on them.
“Alistair . . .”
“This isn’t a good day,” Alistair said to the ground between his knees. “I’m sorry. If you’ll just—give me a moment. Please. Forgive me.”
“There is nothing to forgive,” Teagan said.
Finally, Alistair was able to look up and eat a little lunch. “Thank you, milord,” he said quietly.
“How long has this been going on?” Teagan asked him.
Alistair was bitter. “All of it, or just the knocking-me-around bit?” Teagan broke a chicken wing to get at more of the meat and just looked at him. “Ever since somebody decided I was old enough to run errands to the village,” he said. “No one ever touches me around the castle. They talk, make the odd, charming little comment, but that’s it. In the village, everything is fair game.” He shrugged. “It’s not always this bad. I can handle it. Mostly.”
“Have you told Eamon?”
Alistair looked at Teagan. “He saw bruises once when he came for lunch. He told me to take care of myself when he left and sent out for a pot of ointment from the Circle. He didn’t say anything else, and he didn’t do anything else. He’d fulfilled his obligation.” Alistair’s hand stole beneath his tunic, to where he wore a Chantry amulet Eamon had given him a couple of years ago, saying it had belonged to his mother.
If Mother was alive, it would all be better.
But she’s not.
“I’m sorry, milord,” Alistair said to Teagan after a moment. “I know he’s your brother, and you love him. And I’m a lot more grateful than I probably sound. The arl is—he’s a wonderful man. He’s done everything for me, when I’m just—nothing. Nothing. A . . . a servant girl’s bastard.” The ugly word left a bad taste in his mouth. “An orphan.”
Sometimes he wasn’t sure about that last one, any more than anyone else was, and that was probably almost half his problem with the others. If Eamon’s household and the villagers really believed that his mother had been forced or seduced by that shiftless lordling they’d told him about, or had been a bit stupid with one of Eamon’s rangers, somehow Alistair thought they might have been a little more sympathetic or forgiving. But at any rate, no one was stepping up to claim him.
Bann Teagan looked strange. Alistair stared moodily across the picnic blanket at him.
Sometimes, when he’d been younger, Alistair had snuck into the guest rooms of the castle and looked at his reflection in the mirrors there. They were too expensive for the servants’ quarters where he had lived. He’d made stupid faces, posed like a guard or a hero in the storybooks he’d read from Eamon’s library. But sometimes he’d just looked, trying to find some resemblance to the arl or the bann in the face he saw in the mirror. Sometimes he’d thought he had a nose like Eamon’s, or hair a bit like Teagan’s. Hoped, maybe.
Except he didn’t, really. Probably the truth was exactly what they’d told him: that his father had been a shiftless lordling, a handsome and charming but really quite useless visitor to Redcliffe who had taken sick and died before the bastard child he’d sired on one of Eamon’s servant girls had been born, killing his mother in the process. Maybe Alistair resembled the nobleman. Handsome and charming but really quite useless—he’d heard that often enough, or variations on that basic idea. Maybe he resembled his mother, or the half-sister they said had gone to live with her own father’s relatives in Denerim. But Alistair had never met his sister, and the only thing he had of either of his parents was his Chantry amulet. But he didn’t look like Eamon.
Bann Teagan did. Oh, not usually. Arl Eamon was . . . the arl. He had wrinkles around his eyes and across his forehead, and silver in his dark hair, and a bushy beard that covered almost half his face. He was always busy, always serious, and sometimes, it seemed like the only times Alistair saw him were the times that he, Alistair, was in trouble. Eamon seemed a lot more than six years older than Teagan, whose hair was a much lighter, more reddish brown. Teagan kept his beard trimmed, just a little goatee around his mouth, and though Alistair probably saw Teagan much less frequently than the arl—Teagan had his own estate and his own people to look after—whenever Teagan came around, he always seemed to have time for Alistair. He played in a way Eamon never, ever did.
But the Guerrin brothers had the same face, and sometimes, Alistair could see it. Teagan’s lips went all thin and hard just like the arl’s did when he was thinking about something difficult and a little unpleasant. “Well, exactly,” the bann said finally. “You’re an orphan. A bastard.”
Alistair blinked hard and looked down at his knees again, throwing his chicken down on his plate. But Teagan reached out and gripped his shoulder. “If you think about it, it doesn’t make much sense for the Redcliffe children to mock or hurt a nothing, does it?” he asked. Alistair looked up at him. “In fact, I would say it was a rather foolish exercise.”
“They don’t care—” Alistair started.
“So make them,” Teagan suggested. “Alistair, whatever else you may be, you are not foolish. That means that however powerless you may feel in other respects, you have the power to make those who would torment you see that there is nothing to be gained in doing so. Men—and children—bully others because it makes them feel big and important. They believe that putting down others somehow proves their own strength in comparison. But what does tormenting a bastard orphan prove about anyone?” He raised his eyebrows, meeting Alistair’s eyes.
Alistair snorted. “What crushing an insect might prove, I suppose,” he said. Teagan extended his hand to Alistair, as if to say, there you are. Alistair looked harder at Teagan, getting it. If he could make giving him a hard time look stupid, sort of small, anyone who was doing it to feel big, like Teagan said, wouldn’t want to do it anymore. “Do you think it could work?” he asked.
“Not always,” Teagan admitted, wiping his greasy chicken fingers on the grass. “As sad as it is, there are cruel people in the world, people who crush insects just to crush them, and not to prove anything. There are also people who, once made to feel how foolish they are being, become angry as they become ashamed. But I think you will learn which is which. And I think it could help. And . . . when it doesn’t—”
He leaped up then and held out his hand, and Alistair took it and let Teagan pull him to his feet.
“There are several things you can do when one person—or several—wants to pull you into a fight. Here—I’ll show you.”
Alistair looked down at the picnic blanket and scooped a last slice of cheese off his plate. He stuffed it in his mouth, then followed Teagan away from the blanket to a stretch of open ground beside the brook. Teagan walked around him, moving his shoulders and legs into position, and Alistair listened, and watched, and started to learn.