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“My turn,” Neve announced as they finished their fish. She licked her fingers shamelessly. Nothing like Hal’s fish, with a bonus of looking out on the water on a sunny afternoon, as nice a day as Dock Town could supply. And, like Rook had said, no cultists or demons trying to kill them today. A win on several levels.
“Your turn for what?” Rook asked.
“For asking questions. You’ve asked plenty of me.”
He spread his arms out. “Fair enough. Anything you like, then. I’m an open book.”
“Open Rook?” she said with a laugh.
He smiled back. “If you like.”
“All right.” She’d been thinking of her questions already. Maybe she could even get answers to satisfy Tarquin’s constant worrying. “You know I’m from Minrathous. What about you, where do you come from?”
Varric had been a known quantity, with a deep web of contacts and information. Everybody who was anybody knew who Varric Tethras was: famous author, merchant, publisher, friend of the Champion, ally of the Inquisition, one-time Viscount of Kirkwall. Rook was… new. You’ll like him, Slick, Varric had said, and filled in with some yarn that she’d taken in with amusement and a heaping pile of salt. Varric exaggerated: this was one of the things she’d known about him, so she needed to take the measure of Rook for herself.
So far, she’d learned quite a bit about Rook’s decision-making, his willingness to try something even if it was risky, how quickly he assessed other people’s temperaments and expertise. She knew he’d stepped into the leadership of their little group without missing a step, and on top of that, he’d offered to help her around Dock Town more than she’d expected. Still, she knew only a little about who and what he’d been before he fell in with Varric.
“Can’t say I’ve spent enough time in one place to be from much of anywhere,” Rook said.
“Really? You must have started out somewhere.”
“Oh, is this what’s it’s like, being questioned by the famous Neve Gallus?” He grinned, taking any sting out of the words, eyes dancing.
That smile was irresistible, and fortunately Neve didn’t have to try. She smiled back. Rook was unfairly good-looking in general, but especially now, with the sunlight turning his hair to gold. “Just a friendly interrogation,” she said. “It’s good to know who you’re working with.”
“Mm. Fair.” He glanced around the harbor. “I grew up in the alienage in Highever, down in Ferelden. It wasn’t much of a life, especially if you were a restless kid. Not a lot of work or opportunity unless you liked taking orders as someone’s servant.”
“You’re not Dalish, then.” She’d wondered about his facial markings, but most Dalish carried themselves with a certain defensive pride that she hadn’t seen in Rook.
He chuckled. “No. Not for lack of trying.”
“Oh?” Neve asked, intrigued.
“I left the alienage in my teens. I was bored, I’d gotten into a bit of trouble…” He shrugged. “I thought I’d run off and join the Dalish. Finally found a clan, but they weren’t too keen on some city kid barging in. They told me I had to prove myself, and kept giving me tests, and after a while I realized there was always going to be another test. So I moved on.”
“That must have been disappointing,” Neve said.
“Let’s just say I shoveled a lot of halla dung,” Rook said. “Hey, are you still hungry?”
He tilted his head toward a cart selling fried sweet dough balls, drizzled with honey and syrup. “Sure,” Neve said, and Rook bought a bag.
“What was that about a bit of trouble?” Neve asked as they started up the hill from the waterfront.
“I knew you’d notice that,” he said between bites. “Nothing serious. A little petty theft, a little fighting in the streets. The sort of things that happens when you’re young and bored and cooped up in the alienage.”
He offered the bag, and Neve took one, relishing the sweetness and the crisp outer layer of the dough. “A young delinquent, noted,” she said. “And after you left the Dalish?”
“I said it wasn’t serious,” he said with a laugh. “After that… well, after that I really didn’t spend much time in one place. Signed up as crew on a ship for a season. Wasn’t actually any good at it, but I’d ended up in the Free Marches. Knocked around a lot. Got decently good with a sword.”
“A lot of fighting in the Free Marches back when the Circles collapsed,” Neve noted. She’d been old enough then to pay attention to events outside the empire, and young enough to be baffled and horrified by tales of the southern mages and templars at war.
“Yes,” Rook said. “It took a long time for things to settle down, even after the Inquisition came along. Lots of work for a hired sword.”
Lots of opportunities to see and do things you’d rather not, she thought. But Rook hadn’t hardened himself to that sort of life the way some mercenaries did. He still cared about helping people, she’d seen that more than once. “But you never settled anywhere?” she asked.
“No.” He shrugged. “I suppose I’d gotten to like moving around. I got a lot of jobs guarding caravans, the smaller ones didn’t care if you were an elf as long as you could handle yourself.”
“Right,” Neve said. There was more behind that, she’d guess; a young elf on his own couldn’t have had an easy time of it. She chose not to push further into that topic right now. “But somehow you ended up a Warden.”
Rook laughed a little. “Yeah.”
“Not the most obvious fit, for someone not good at taking orders,” she observed.
“What can I say?” He spread his hands. “I ran into a Warden recruiter who was good at his job. And I was getting bored with what I was doing.”
“I’m sensing a theme,” Neve said dryly. “Bored again, and on to the next thing?”
“Mm, you’re not wrong.” Rook smiled. “I suppose I was romantic enough to think having a cause and a purpose sounded good.”
“Ah, youthful idealism,” Neve said, thinking back to the young mage who’d set herself up as a fixer-of-problems in Dock Town. “Haven’t we all been there?”
He nodded. “More or less. Most of that rubbed off pretty fast.”
She could say the same for herself. She’d come back to Dock Town after her schooling without much more than the thinnest of hopes: to help people, to make a little difference in the place where she’d grown up. Yet here she still was, and here was Rook, and they’d both found themselves a purpose, all right. “Not all of it, though,” Neve said, testing.
Rook shot her a glance. “I suppose I wouldn’t be here if it had,” he said, which was exactly what she had been thinking.
“Probably none of us would be,” she agreed. So far, all of them – except maybe Lucanis, she wasn’t sure about him yet – had enough of their idealism left to commit themselves into this wild cause.
“I probably jumped in too fast. I’d walked away from a lot of things, but you don’t walk away from the Wardens.” Rook offered her the last of the sweets. Neve took it with a nod of thanks.
“No, you don’t hear of people leaving,” Neve said. Part of the Grey Warden legend. She’d never had much cause to probe into the things that Wardens didn’t talk about.
“For a while I thought I’d made a mistake,” he said. “But I believed in the oath and we do actually get to help people. I could stick with that.”
“And yet you did leave in the end,” she said.
“Not exactly by choice, this time,” Rook said. “Though I wouldn’t say I’m sorry to have left. Traveling with Varric was… eye-opening.”
“Eye-opening how?” she asked, intrigued. Rook didn’t ordinarily talk much about Varric, though Harding said they’d seemed close.
He was silent for a few moments while they strolled through the crossing. Paper-sellers and hucksters and ordinary citizens swirled around them, the usual sounds of Minrathous. “Varric’s just interested in getting the job done,” he said finally. “He asked me how I thought we should do things, instead of giving me orders, so we’ve gotten along well. Plus, the jobs tended to be a lot weirder. That’s always interesting. And, well… I think you know the rest, more or less.”
“I suppose I do, more or less,” Neve allowed.
He gave her another crooked smile. “Satisfied with my answers, detective?”
“Almost,” Neve said. “One more thing: you must have a name other than Rook.”
He raised his eyebrows. “What, ‘Rook’ isn’t good enough for you?”
“It’s good enough,” she said. “But I can tell one of Varric’s nicknames when I hear it. You must have had a name before.”
“No, I came nameless from the Wardens,” he said, the smile turning teasing. “No one ever called me anything but ‘hey, you’ until Varric met me.”
Neve laughed and swatted his arm. “Fine, be that way.” She could find out with a bit of digging, she’d wager. Lace Harding must know, at the very least.
He was laughing, too. “Thorne,” he said. “If you really want to know.”
“That’s all?” Neve said. “Given name or family name?”
He wrinkled his nose. “Oh, well. I haven’t used my given name in ages. Warden Thorne worked well enough. Truth be told, I like Rook better.”
“Now you have me curious,” Neve said, with another laugh.
He sighed. “Oh, the relentless questioning of the fearsome detective…”
“Villains quake before me,” Neve said.
“Peregrin, all right? I was Peregrin Thorne.”
“What, like the bird?”
“I suppose? I don’t know what my mother was thinking, but I never thought to ask her.” He shrugged. “It always felt a little fanciful for the alienage.”
He hadn’t said much about his family. Neve noticed that silence, lying behind what he had said. That, too, she decided to leave alone for the moment. “You know, in Old Tevene, peregrinus means a wanderer, or a traveler,” she said.
“Does it? Well, I suppose that’s fitting enough after all, then.”
They rounded a corner, and the Shadow Dragons’ shop came into sight before them. Neve said, “Rook suits you, I’ll give you that.”
“Glad you think so.” He stepped aside to avoid a cart passing in the street, and his arm pressed against hers, shoulder to shoulder. “Oh, sorry…”
“No need,” Neve said, as he turned toward her and their eyes met, only a few handspans apart. Rook had brown eyes tinged with gold, unusual, and absurdly pretty eyelashes.
Rook said, “And now are you satisfied, detective?”
Up close, that smile was even more devastating. Her breath caught as their gazes held. Gathering herself, Neve said, “That’ll do, for now.”
Her cheeks felt a little warm as they separated, awareness of just how close together they’d been lingering like a shock. It was nothing, she told herself firmly. People bumped into each other sometimes. She’d gotten enough answers to satisfy her curiosity, to know her team leader a little better. She needed to stick to the job, which was complicated enough without inviting any more complications. Rook was competent enough, and they saw eye to eye on most things. They worked together just fine. There didn’t need to be anything more to it than that.
All the same, her heart was beating a little faster as they went together into the hideout.