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Salome’s problems are the same as every woman in Thedas: feed the gulping mouths of her household and keep her man fat and happy. That that man is the king of Ferelden, and the household’s gulping mouths are an old man, a mabari, a cook, and a housemaid and, on alternate weekends, a fortress of Grey Wardens, makes no matter. She has been thinking of the road not taken lately.
She thinks about herself at nineteen: headstrong, stupid, angry, with a fuckoff greatsword on her back. She would have been a wife, and then a mother in short order, all the anger inside her washed out by a brood of chicks. Better to be married than stay a child, even with the sweetest and gentlest of fathers. No one will ever lock Salome in an alienage again. Certainly not Alistair, her bulwark, head and shoulders taller than her and broad as a barn. If the Circles are gone, what justification remains for the alienage?
It’s the timing and the political situation, is her man’s wife’s reasoning, at least as Alistair relays it to her. This is dumb as fuck; she is probably the most important elf politically in Ferelden. It pays to keep her happy. She did not give up a life with her father, her cousins, her friends from babyhood, a husband and children to be unhappy. This is a heavy weight on the scale, but Alistair has always been a sufficiently cheerful counterweight. When she was nineteen she was not politically minded but being the king’s mistress has been an education. The role has corseted and constricted by turns, but she is settled in it now.
Salome has always found the act of loving to be agonizing, sloppy, awkward. It humiliates her knowing the whole country gossips about her and consequently her love life even after she dropped off the map. But they were young lovers tied in knots with relief. Neither of them were thinking about her reputation.
In the small chest she brought from the ruins of her father’s home she keeps a pressed rose, her mother’s dagger, and a rusted ring. These are the only artifacts of who she was before the Blight. That time is a broken cobblestone in the road.
Life now is richer and fuller, in a way a teenager couldn’t have anticipated. Her days are busy with the minutia of running the Wardens, searching for information on the Calling, answering letters, training with her greatsword. Her father is reaching an age where his health is collapsing in fits and starts. She has begun to want to spend time with other elves, to take an interest in her language. She might have missed her chance to have children that look like her but that isn’t the end of her being an elf in a human world.
Alistair is very busy these days, not too busy for her but beyond her reach most of the time. Once Salome had dreamed of the two of them traveling together, walking forever, into a more beautiful world somewhere. Things are simpler between Salome, Alistair, and Anora, but never truly simple. He didn’t want a country or a wife and she forced both on him. He didn’t want a child with Morrigan, and she forced that on him, too. Having a child together will never be politically expedient but it may not even be physically possible for the two of them. Simply another thing the taint has taken.
In some ways Anora is the easier one to face. She has no reason to like Salome, or enjoy her company, but she seems to. A wife and a mistress are natural enemies, but the two of them are something like friends. She remembers to ask after Salome’s father and cousins, and Salome remembers not to ask after Anora’s. In the most miserable small way a person can be grateful, Salome is glad that there is no bonny baby prince, no fatly jolly little daughters. Anora already gets the lifespan, the man, the power, nearly free reign over the country. She understands the practical considerations of a hereditary monarchy but that doesn’t mean she likes to think about it. They are friendly but Salome has always been competitive with Anora. The half serious addendum to all of her prayers: if Anora must have a child, let Salome be first!
Salome can pretend that Anora doesn’t know about her, and her position under and over the king, but it would be an unkind fiction. Even if they hadn’t discussed during their deal brokering a decade ago, she is simply always lurking around the king when she is in town. She is always haunting court, in an ill-bred kind of way. Alistair sleeps in her bed six out of seven nights a week. No one says the name Salome Tabris in the queen’s ear, but somehow she always manages to greet Salome publicly somewhere just after she arrives. She can always recognize a glint in another’s eye that says I know what you are, slut. Anora does not look at her like this, but many in court do, and they are even further offended that she is an elf.
She and Anora are allies on one face of the silver. On the other, Alistair is a pigeon homing between two strong willed women with ideas that, while not opposing, are not in service of the same ends. They do not bother to maintain the polite lie that either of their missions are the king’s. It is very transparent when Alistair is not presenting his own thoughts. In herself Salome has discovered a bloodthirsty political machine with hungry snapping teeth. It is just as well Alistair is not interested in politics. It makes more room at the table.
When it is all too much Salome can simply remove herself to Amaranthine (when she feels like the dust and dirt of the road beckons), to the peace and gloom of the little chapel close by the Vigil. It is the coolest place in the city, for the sea breezes are caught and fed down by long slits cut into the walls. To pray there is to kneel in a spiral of cool air and think of heaven. In the quiet she can hear gulls and fishmongers crying aloud.
Warden-Commander is a far better person to be than kingmaker. In Amaranthine men live and die by her word. She would die for them, and they would die for her. Their numbers are small but they throw themselves on the pyre to see Salome smile. Peacetime conscripts are almost uniformly criminals, but in Amaranthine they become something else altogether different. Not good people-that is for the Maker to judge-but they pull at the yoke in synchronization instead of shucking the yoke off.
Her Wardens yearn for purpose, and she is a firm believer in the power of busy hands to gladden a heart. The time comes when the sky rips open. Wardens are put to work killing demons and monsters, and the Ferelden monarchs turn aside from Salome in the chaos. Even-this stings deeply-even Alistair does not turn to Salome first but to Anora.
So she slips away in the night. She has questions that need answers. She is kind, and leaves him a note. She is pursuing a mystery that benefits both of them, after all. Her father and Shianni and Soris are walled about with thick stone. She has a large and heavy sword on her back. She has nothing to fear. She need only head west, following the lodestone in her head.
While she is gone, the Wardens are being drawn to Adamant. She is so far away by then it is little more than a tingle at the back of her mind. The taint sings chorals in her blood, like it does every day. She notices no difference. Soon she is consumed by the mystery of the taint, the mabari she cured at Ostagar, the flower. It all blends together in her mind. She thinks of nothing else. She walks without food or drink so long she no longer needs them. The countryside turns to scrub, then forest, then the light gets dimmer and colder.
When she dreams, it is the only thing she dreams of, the red throated flower, turning into a bird and flying away from her. Soon it is no longer confined to her dreams, and hops about on the forest floor before her, singing a sweet little ditty. Later, she will remember it having words, but she won’t remember them. She follows it deeper and deeper into the west, into the forest primeval unseen by man or elf in an age of the world. She and the bird disappear deep into the gloam. She drinks the nectar syrup of the flower, and the songs in her blood vanish into wisps of smoke.
When she emerges, dazed and amnesiac, she is clutching a baker’s dozen of the flowers by the throat. She is bleeding thickly from her nose, eyes, and ears. The flowers are gargantuan, and the roots and bulbs drag long and knotted on the ground behind her for the length of a man or more. On the day she comes home she can see Alistair well before she can yell to him, a stocky beloved figure facing a woman, surrounded by strangers far on the other end of the bridge. Standing in the stirrups she calls his name, twice and then three times. She sees a head turn, and then the others follow like lemmings. He drops a cloud of papers. He waves and shouts something.
She dismounts and lets the horse settle peaceably off to her side. He starts walking but he’s running on winged feet by the time she crashes into him. He bodily lifts her and crushes her into his chest. They spin together, her feet coming up off the ground. She is giggling, which is humiliating, but glee is bubbling up out of her and she can’t stop. She screams over and over, “I did it!”
He sets her down, winds a fat rope of braid around his wrist, pulls her head back, and kisses her in one fast, complicated movement. This is so devastatingly suave she swoons. She needs to find out who he learned it from.
“Amazing!” he says when the two of them stop for air. “But what did you do?”
“I took a walk,” she says. “And I know how to quiet the Calling. I saw it in a dream.”
“Then I am very happy to see you, and not quite ready to kill you,” Alistair says. He smells like leather warmed in the sun. She looks all over his dear face, and it is all there for her to read: he missed her, he wants to kill her, he feels bad for embarrassing Anora in front of the court. He loves her, is the most important one, and she finds it first.
“I love you, too,” she says. This gets her kissed in a toe-curling way. She reverts immediately to the swooning teenager again. She turns a red so red it becomes a little purple. No one will ever separate them again.