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Nathaniel doesn’t know how to reconcile the warden-commander he meets with the fact that she killed his father.
He knows she did; she knows she did. When he asked her if she even remembered his father she laughed long and loudly and falsely before she started screaming that his father sold her people into slavery and deserved what she gave him and more; she claimed the killing with a grim, cold pride and bared teeth like a mabari, pointed tattoos marking her face like kaddis. He thought he was angry about this, the injustice of his lands going to his father’s murderer, but the anger that she has swallows his up, engulfs it, takes it and spits it back in his face, you know nothing, you are a fool.
That woman, that short elf with brown skin framed by warden blue and long braided hair, snarling at him – she killed his father. He can believe it, easily, in that moment.
But she let him go.
All her screaming, the look she gave him like she’d rip his heart out with her teeth – she let him go. She turned to the guard captain and told him to give Nathaniel what he had stolen, and let him take it and go, and she turned on her heel and the way she walked, held her head high, he could really believe what he he meant as a taunt – that she's ten feet tall.
He even told her that he might come back, that he might know how not to get caught next time – and she let him go. If it was cruel mercy, to leave him knowing that he is indebted to his father’s killer, it was foolish. If it was kind mercy, for mercy's sake...
Then he’s wrong about her. And if he's wrong about her, then he's wrong about his father. And if he's wrong about them both - what then?
Nathaniel doesn’t know how to reconcile the Warden-Commander Tabris that he meets again with the woman he met in the Keep’s dungeon.
He tracks her down, asks to be accepted as a warden, and expects her cold laugh grating in his ears to be the lightest injury he might receive. She says yes, and he stands there in stupid silence for a moment because that’s the only outcome that he didn’t play through in his mind. He had to try; he had no delusions of succeeding.
She said yes, and she doesn’t let him walk behind her while her two fellow wardens don’t even try to hide their glares, but she said yes.
To talk to him, or Anders, the warden mage, to meet their eyes, she has to tilt her head nearly all the way back, look up like she's looking to the sky. She snarls at half of the men they talk to in Amaranthine, angry and impatietn, but the dry remarks she makes without a change of expression make Nathaniel laugh with the other two, and when they find a map with the Blackmarsh marked and circled, she looks to Nathaniel and asks him what he knows about it. They’re chasing a senior warden who survived the darkspawn attack, Anders explains; “Boss needs someone who knows what they’re doing,” Oghren adds.
“You don’t know what you’re doing?” Nathaniel asks, and the commander laughs, and it sounds real this time, still sharp, but real, and he takes that as a no, I don’t. When they step back out into the streets of Amaranthine, under the sun, Nathaniel looks at her and sees, past scars and tattoos and heavy eyebrows, that she is young. Ferelden’s hero, barely more than a child, a girl in warden blue but bare feet on Amaranthine’s cobblestones, loose hairs slipping out from behind long thin ears, sharp as her laugh and her jokes and her eyes. She laughs at the chickens walking free in the streets, imitates their clucks like she’s trying to communicate with them; she slaps Anders’ arm to point out a cat; and she murdered Nathaniel’s father in his own estate, and he doesn’t know if it was a clean death or whether she left him to bleed out slowly on the floor, choking on his own blood, a knife buried in his throat.
He doesn’t ask. He was wrong about her and his father both; he was ignorant about much, but some things he doesn’t know if he wants to know.