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“Ah, ah, keep your eyes closed, my dear,” the accented voice makes her still – her wards had been shattered and now there’s a stranger with her son - “Just a little longer, no? And I’ll have you back to your Mama.”
Kieran’s affirmative is a snot-choked hiccupping noise but it seemed to have been accompanied with a nod or something similar.
“Ah-hah! Such a brave young man,” the Antivan voice cheers quietly.
She doesn’t know how to react to Zevran Arainai stepping out of her son’s room cradling his head so that he can’t look anywhere but into the man’s cloth covered shoulder. His daggers are sheathed but clearly spotted with blood – and the assassin’s face had been hastily wiped ‘clean’, if that was the word to describe the faint smears of blood on his cheeks.
His eyes meet hers and he smiles – it’s a cold sort of thing that no longer reaches his gaze as he gives it.
“He is unharmed, dear witch,” he says, gently passing the toddler to her. “Kieran was quite brave for me.”
“He is always brave,” she glares at him, but double checks her son’s condition as he latches onto her neck and starts sobbing. Unharmed, if frightened. She can feel herself relax a little despite herself as she holds him close.
“I will wait,” Zevran says, making a little shooing motion at her. “We will talk after.”
When Kieran is calmed and settled into her own bed to sleep once more she finds the assassin in her son’s room wrapping a third body tight in a sheet as he had already done to the first two.
“Who are they?”
“All they carried were these,” he hands her an amulet - a modified Chantry design unless she is mistaken - and she has to suppress the annoyance she feels that he’s not even hiding the fact that he’s keeping the other two to investigate on his own.
“I don’t recognize the crest.”
“No – nor do I,” the assassin straightens as he finishes. He looks over the room with a faint frown. “There is very little here, no?”
“My son and I must be ready to go quickly,” she replies stiffly.
The assassin’s gaze flicks to her at my . “He would be safe in Amaranthine or Denerim, that is not a question, I hope?”
“From my Mother?”
“Surely, dear Witch, you know our Wardens would fight all seven Old Gods, the Creators, and the Maker for that boy.”
“…how long have you known I was here?”
Zevran looks away for a moment, “Leliana warned me of your presence here. Orlais is dangerous, no? It is better to have more friends in the shadows than one might suspect.”
“She and I are no friends.”
“My Warden and she are,” Zevran’s expression turns wry. “You did not truly believe that he would not care at all for the boy? That your friends would not think of him at all?”
“Kieran is my son,” her tone edges into a warning hiss. The assassin may hold no grudge over the circumstances of Kieran’s birth - the ritual saved his Warden, her first friend, her only one if she is to be truthful - but the refusal to let her son know his father is not a subject that she can be certain of Zevran’s opinion.
“Si - and when the boy asks after fathers? Will you refuse to share that knowledge as yours did?”
She flinches at that - she is not raising her son in the wilds, deprived of all human contact and unaccustomed to other people. She is not her Mother, she must do better by him than that.
Zevran studies her before giving a dramatic shrug as if truly dismissing the topic from his concerns, “Ah, but what does a Crow know of family? I will look into our late friends - on the house, of course.”
Months later she finds herself frowning at the gift that accompanies the reassurance that the enemies who thought to attack her through Kieran are dealt with.
Her son pets a sleepy mabari puppy as she examines the silverite brooch that had been wrapped in a swathe of Warden-blue velvet and a short, unsigned letter in a familiar hand ( For if you wish him to know of me, my friend, but my love suggested that a friend might be needed. The puppy was sired by our canine companion, I thought it fitting our pups could grow together.) that had been left on the table for her.