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It’s the cooking that Esti misses most about her clan. She feels more like she belongs with the people she’s met in this Inquisition, but not a one of them cooks like the hahrens could. The thought comes to her from nowhere one evening, sitting cross-legged in the moss of the Emerald Graves, memorials to her ancestors stretched tall and leafy toward the sky, mopping up tasteless stew with slightly stale bread as she listens to Solas and Vivienne discuss magic in academic terms she doesn’t understand; and Cassandra and Varric argue about Hawke and wardens; and Sera and Blackwall laugh.
She could join any of their conversations but is content to sit for the moment with half a hard roll and an empty bowl. The heavy feeling of death, of the Veil thinned, hangs even as she thinks that this is one of the most peaceful places she has ever been to; and none of the others are Dalish, and Solas is the only one who would begin to understand, and Esti doesn’t even know if she wants to talk about this feeling. Certainly she doesn’t want to interrupt him and Vivienne. They might try and draw her into their conversation, and she would look the fool she, First and Inquisitor, pretends not to be.
Up the hill, not far, looms a white stone statue of a wolf. The Dales have been marked with them; Esti wonders if they too are lingering signs of her ancestors, but surely they would not have left so many shrines to Fen'Harel across Arlathan, not when there is no trace of a single monument to the Creators. (The shemlen could have destroyed those statues, if they once existed, but why leave the solely the wolf?)
Still, it can’t be anything but a shrine, and the thought makes their little campfire feel more like a clan, a clan that is hers, her clan, Esti’s clan, not Clan Lavellan but somewhere that she belongs. She has tried to take up wood-carving like Blackwall, scraping lumps of leftover firewood into shapes, leaving small wolves at the edges of the Inquisition’s camps to draw the Trickster’s eyes away from her people, but her attempts pale in comparison to any stone statue made by the Dalish. (“Is that a fish?” Varric asked, and Esti stared at the carving in her hand and wondered how he got that from what is obviously a wolf. Supposed to be a wolf. Okay, if she turned the carving, turned her head, and squinted, she could see how he might get fish.)
Esti takes the last of her bread and climbs up the hill. No one notices, or at least no one attempts to stop her. The wolf is even larger up close and she holds the bread in her mouth and hoists herself up the statue’s base to sit leaning against the wolf’s flank. She bites off some of the bread – it’s even worse without the stew, but it is the proper way to share food, show that it isn’t poisoned before giving it to a guest – and sets the remainder beside one of the stone paws, bigger than her head. “Accept this offering, Fen'Harel,” she says. “Avert your eyes and do not cast harm upon my clan.”
Her clan, the Inquisition, and her clan, Lavellan. She hopes that they will do well in Wycome, now that the Venatori threat is eliminated. She hopes the neighboring Marcher cities will turn their gazes away from her people and let them live. If she had to chance on shemlen in large numbers, or the Dread Wolf, she would throw herself upon Fen'Harel’s mercy every time. There is no hatred of her people like the shemlen’s hatred of her people, and the Dread Wolf can be at least placated with simple offerings, simple respect.
“I didn’t know wolves ate bread.”
Esti jumps at the sudden voice and looks all around, nearly falling from her perch before she looks down and sees Cole standing there. Cole. She forgot about him, again, and she feels bad every time, no matter if it is his fault, not hers, that he is forgotten.
“I don’t know that wolves would enjoy Cassandra’s stew much more, either,” Esti says. She shifts over to make room for Cole should he want to sit with her, and it seems as though he almost appears beside her. Once, when Solas first spoke of calling spirits friend, Esti found it odd, but she understands and wishes she had sooner, when she was with her clan and lonely, so that she may have found friends in her dreams, in the Beyond, instead of flinching scared for fear that they all were demons.
“Fen'Harel isn’t really a wolf, anyway,” she adds. “He’s a god, and gods can eat whatever they want.”
“Stale seems not a sacrifice but instead insult, all I have so all I can give, think should be thankful when that’s all that he’s given.”
It still throws Esti when he does that, and she takes a moment to parse his words – her own jumbled thoughts, spat back at her by a quiet scratchy voice from a pallid face half-hidden beneath ratty hair and a huge hat. “I don’t think any god wants stale bread,” Esti says slowly, “but it’s all I have to give and so few of the People give offering to the Dread Wolf, and he should be – I hope he’s happy to be given any – something.”
She trips over her words to avoiding saying should be grateful to be given anything because those words are harsh, arrogant, to assume of a god, any god, but especially the Trickster. It’s demanding, when rather she wants to make offering, not demand.
“Dread sounds bad,” Cole says simply. “You give to bad gods?”
Esti shakes her head. “Those are the Forgotten Ones, the ones that arereally bad. Fen'Harel is… kind of a dick, but not… there are worse.” Cole doesn’t say anything, and Esti finds herself babbling on, because she doesn’t know what he knows of her gods, how much he’s picked out of her mind when he’s surrounded by so many more who have Andraste as their goddess, instead. How their cumulative belief must drown out hers. “There were two clans of gods, the Creators and the Forgotten Ones. The Creators were kind to the People, while the Forgotten Ones wanted to destroy us. Fen'Harel was of neither clan, but also both.”
Sometimes she feels like that, caught between but in both the Inquisition and Clan Lavellan, though she will mark neither as the Forgotten Ones and the comparison casts herself as the Traitor. “He walked freely between them, even though both sides were fighting a terrible war against each other. They both trusted him as one of their own; and so he betrayed them both. He tricked them by telling the Forgotten Ones to go to the Abyss and the Creators to the Heavens in search of a powerful weapon. There was no such weapon. Fen'Harel sealed off the Heavens and the Abyss, trapping the Forgotten Ones and the Creators all away from our world.
"So they have stayed since, and so only Fen'Harel remains to stalk the mortal world.”
“You think he took your gods away, but you give him a gift,” Cole says. “Of stale bread.”
Esti twists the ring that Keeper gave her before she left for the Conclave, sylvanwood, a Keeper ring like she would get one day when she came into charge of Clan Lavellan. (The thought made her shudder, when Keeper handed her the ring, and the thought made her guilty, when she thought about how her plan post-Conclave was to return to the clan to report and then strike out alone, abandoning her position as First. Now the thought seems appropriate. She is Keeper, Inquisitor, of a clan, Inqusition.)
“It’s more like a peace offering. Sometimes Fen'Harel helps the Dalish, and sometimes he hurts them, and it is all for his own amusement. We make offering in hope that he will leave us alone – it’s a bribe, to go find someone else to bother.”
Cole nods. “The Creators are out of our reach,” Esti continues. “We pray to them, of course, and make offerings, but Fen'Harel is still here, and if he is ignored he would do terrible things to remind the People that he remains. In our camps, we have shrines to all of the gods, and we set Fen'Harel’s on the edge of the camp. We hope that he will look past the camp, to his shrine, and so ignore us for the respectful acknowledgment we make of him.
"No one prays to him. Keeper always says that if you prayed to Fen'Harel, he would answer your prayer, but not in a way that made you happy. What you asked for, at a terrible price, like how she warned me about blood magic.” Esti rubs the Keeper ring. It’s gotten scorched in battle, on her finger, and she thinks perhaps it would be safer worn on a cord about her neck.
“See, when I was little, I had this thought – when you really want something, you pray. But everyone’s all praying to Mythal, and Sylaise –” she brings a hand up to touch the vallaslin around her left eye – “and Andruil and all, and not just in my clan but in all the clans all over. That’s so many prayers they have to listen to, and they’re already so far away, trapped in the Beyond, that it must be so hard to help from there, and they must have such a long list of prayers to answer. And so I thought, well, Fen'Harel isn’t trapped anywhere. He’s here in the world with us, and who prays to Fen'Harel? He’s in a better position to be able to give help, and he’d have such a short list of prayers to fill.”
Esti laughs at the memory, of herself, so small, saying this to the Keeper. Mythal bless Deshanna, for her patience – and then Esti feels the smile slide off her face as it occurs to her what Keeper must have felt when, of all the clan, it was Esti found to have magic, Esti to be First, someday to lead. (How must she have been afraid.)
“Shaking fingers make sparks, Sylaise made fire and so do I, palms presented like a present, look, Keeper! You were proud, then. Then you got scared. She didn’t want to scare you, she wanted you safe. She loves you. The only one in the clan who wanted you gone was you.”
Tears sting at her eyes. “No, that didn’t help,” Cole says, sounding confused. "You want to belong. You belonged. You didn’t know it. Why doesn’t it help to know it?“
"I can’t go back to them, anyway, Cole,” Esti says, and her voice cracks, and she scrubs at her eyes with the heels of her palms. “I miss them less to think they don’t miss me. I feel bad for them if they miss me.”
If she was wrong, if she was the only one who believed she didn’t have a place in the clan, then she wasted all those years being sad and lonely for no reason but her own stupid mind. “They’re fine without you but they’re find with you, too,” Cole says, and he pauses, and Esti looks at him, and he frowns. “No, that still doesn’t work.”
“It’s okay, Cole, it’s fine,” Esti says. “Don’t worry about it.”
“I can’t,” Cole says, and he sounds anguished, like this hurts him more than it hurts Esti. (She’s learned to live with it, over twenty years of it. Cole hasn’t been here long.) “Marked, muted, but I still hear, still hurt, you want to help everyone. Someone should help you, too.”
“I’m okay,” Esti says. “I’m – I’ll be okay.” She smiles at him.
They sit there, quietly, until Cole speaks again. “Why didn’t Keeper want the wolf to help?”
“Because he’s dreadful,” Esti says, and she doesn’t have to force the smile at Cole this time, but his expression doesn’t change. She remembers Varric trying to teach knock-knock jokes; they must not have puns in the Beyond, either. “Because it’s a gamble, whether when you get Fen'Harel’s attention whether he’ll be nice or cruel, or nice in a cruel way. Better not to have a prayer answered at all than to be answered by Fen'Harel.”
“He doesn’t want to help?”
“No. He doesn’t. He – it’s like – you know how, when Varric writes, he’s mean to the characters in his books because it makes a good story? I think, Fen'Harel wants a good story, except he doesn’t care that we’re not characters, we’re real.”
“You’re real,” Cole echoes. “If you’re real then he’s wrong so you can’t be real, he won’t let you be real. He can’t let you be real.”
“What?” Esti asks, and she thinks Cole is staring back at her, but she can’t see his eyes beneath his hat. What was – what was he – what were they saying – is he making her forget – what is there to forget? Nothing after she told Cole the metaphor of Varric’s stories. He didn’t say anything. Neither did she.
“But Varric’s not dreadful,” Cole says, and Esti laughs.
“No, he isn’t, but that’s because he’s only mean to people who aren’t real.”
“The hurt is real,” Cole says. “Cassandra worries. He’s innocent. He can’t be punished for what he didn’t do. He didn’t do it because he’s not real and it isn’t either, but she still cares.”
“Mhm.” Esti hasn’t read any of Varric’s books besides Tale of the Champion, and only that by chance, because it’s what fell off a wagon into the dirt that she stumbled across and wondered what kind of stories shemlen told. (Only later did she realize, not a shemlen, but a durgen'len, telling about a shemlen, and others. Esti liked Merrill, of everyone in the tale. Her Keeper reminded her of her own Keeper, and Merrill leaving to follow her own path was something Esti wanted to find the courage to do.)
“You like stories, too,” Cole adds. “Yours are old and you think you just repeat them, but you make them your own. People want to listen, not just because you’re the Herald. Because you’re you.” He tilts his head to the side. “Did you pray to the wolf anyway?”
“Sometimes,” Esti admits, and this is the first time she’s confessed that out loud, and the sudden guilt is overwhelming. Shame clings long after she grew up to find that nothing bad came of her prayers. “Less and less as I got older and older, and knew better, most of the time.”
“What did you ask for?” Cole asks.
“Safety – from the shemlen, from demons. To learn to control my magic. To have friends.” She laughs. “Everyone thanked Andraste for saving me, giving me this–” she waves her left hand, the mark, “and I thanked Mythal, but sometimes I think, maybe it was Fen'Harel, kind and cruel. I asked for friends, but I never said when, and I have friends now, so maybe the Dread Wolf did answer that prayer, and give me friends – and a cursed hand and a hole in the sky and a crazy darkspawn along with.”
Cole is quiet, considering this. He lifts his head, a little, and Esti can see his pale eyes. “You don’t believe it,” he tells her, “but you think it would make a good story.”
“Yeah,” Esti says. She wants to believe that a god, any god, would look her way, save her life, mark her hand as a blessing or a curse it doesn’t matter. “It’d be like the story of the slow arrow. An answered prayer that comes in a cruel way, a long time after.”
The sound of the forest has shifted. Esti hears it when she and Cole are quiet again. The dark is falling, the last of the golden-red light that seeped through the leaves fading to blue. She can still see the campfire, down the hill. “So that’s why I give the wolf stale bread,” Esti says, at last, and she realizes she’s been sitting on her foot wrong and carefully wiggles it out. Sharp pain comes first, and then softer uncomfortable tingling. “So maybe he’ll like me and not bother me. That’s why my ancestors built these shrines, too."
If it is a shrine. She’s assuming – but these are the Dales, these lands are hers, and these trees her graves, a cemetery. Dread Wolf, appreciate these shrines, these offerings. Turn your gaze upon your statues, and let the souls of my ancestors pass you by without harm. "They built statues, and I have stale bread.”
“You mean well,” Cole says.
“Sometimes that isn’t enough,” Esti says.
“I know.”
Esti forgot, for a moment, Cole’s story – the White Spire, the ghost, the killer. She puts a hand on his arm. “But we learn. And keep trying.”
“Lethallin.” Solas appears out of the darkness, down at the base of the statue. “Cassandra thinks we can find a more fortified campsite for the night, before it gets dark.”
“Before it gets darker,” Esti corrects, because it’s quite dark already. She hears Solas huff, faintly, in fond annoyance, and she puts a hand on the wolf statue to help herself down, sending a silent prayer to the Trickster before she leaves. I’m sorry I have nothing more to give today, thoughshe hasn’t made any big prayers today, or recently, either. What she gives today is the regular appeasement, not a special thanks.
“Ir abelas, hahren,” she says to Solas when her feet hit the ground, but she can’t stop grinning, and he looks at her, doubtful of her sincerity. “Did Cassandra scout a place to camp?”
“No; we will be scouting in the dark,” Solas replies as they tread down the hill to where Blackwall stomps out the campfire. “But she fears that the bears will become more active in the dark and that our ordinary wards may not hold if we remain in the open.”
“Wandering in the dark is my favorite thing,” Varric grumbles, and almost simultaneously, Esti, Solas, and Vivienne cast wisps to light the area around themselves and their companions.
“Show-offies,” Sera grumbles.
Something brushes against Esti’s hair and she jumps, ready to swat; but it’s only Cole, again, and the wide brim of his hat. “What is the story of the slow arrow?” he asks.
Esti looks around at the shadows hiding the unknown, and her friends, all that has stood between her and danger time and time again, and at the wisps she cast, red almost like dreaded eyes, or the bad kind of lyrium, hanging in the dark. “I’ll tell you in the morning,” she promises. “I don’t like telling stories of monsters in the dark.” Even the little girl who prayed to Fen'Harel was afraid of him when the sun was gone and she couldn’t see the dreaded creeping up on her, was afraid of speaking of him lest she gain his attention, and was afraid especially after growing into a woman with a bit more sense, a bit more caution, and a lot more fear. (Spirits are drawn to strength of emotion, Keeper taught her. Perhaps gods are the same.)
Cassandra leads, and the rest of them – her clan, Esti’s clan, her people, Creators protect them from the idea of Esti as Keeper – assemble to follow, wisps dangling over them in the air. A Keeper’s job, Deshanna said, and Esti, fire in her hands and fear in her head, listened dutifully, is to keep the clan safe. From shemlen, from sickness, from wild beasts and spirits, and from…
Esti twists the sylvanwood ring. Behind her and her clan, a wolf, white stone still bright in the night, and a Keeper’s protection, part of a stale roll.