Chapter Text
Evie is four and a half years old, and Mamae loves her very much, but has to go away lots.
She knows this because Mamae tells her, and because her brother reminds her when she forgets and starts to cry.
“She will come back,” he tells her, patient and soft, every time. “She is thinking of you now, and wants to be with you so badly.”
And she wants her Mamae now—but her brother is very good at giving hugs, and petting her hair and telling her that he knows, he understands.
And when she has stopped crying, sometimes he takes her for a little walk around the campsite. They can’t go far—she’s not allowed past the big white rocks by herself—but when her brother is with her, they can walk into the forest a little bit, and go catch frogs by the river.
Her brother is very, very good at catching frogs. He’s teaching her! So she can be just as good as him. Although, he never seems to get dirty like she does—he stands in the mud, same as her, takes his boots off and kneels down, but his clothes never get dirty. No one ever sees him coming back from the river and says, “Oh, Cole, you’re such a mess! Time for a bath!”
“That’s because I’m a spirit,” he tells her, when she complains about it.
She pouts, trying to wipe mud off her elbows. It’s dried a little in the heat, and it’s so itchy. “I wish I was a spirit,” she says.
“You have one,” her brother says instead. And then he gestures for her to be quiet, and takes her hand again.
He leads her a few steps down—and she is so careful to be quiet like him. He barely splashes at all, so she walks where he walks. He doesn’t leave any ripples, even, and she tries her best, but she can always hear her steps, and, as always, she gets little splashes of mud on the hem of her dress.
She doesn’t like dresses much. Mamae never wears them, so neither does she! But the rest of her clothes are hanging to dry, because she’s gotten them all covered in mud, so she has to wear the dress that Aunt Vivienne gave her a few months ago. Everything else is apparently too small, even though she thinks they fit just fine.
She thinks Aunt Vivienne would probably scold her, if she saw Evie wearing the special dress she ordered for her, all covered in mud.
“I won’t tell,” her brother whispers.
It’s kind of weird, how no one but Cole ever seems to know what she’s thinking. Kind of nice too, though. Because then they’d know for sure she took another handful of blueberries than she was supposed to last night, after dinner.
Except Mamae. Mamae always knows.
Her brother crouches in the reeds, and points to a spot in the mud. He gestures for her to be very quiet, and then lets go of her hand.
She creeps a few steps closer to the spot he pointed at, narrowing her eyes as she focuses on moving very, very slowly—and she moves so slowly, so carefully, that when she finally crouches down right next to the spot, she is rewarded by a tiny little frog poking its head out of the mud, right between her hands.
She catches it quick and gentle, like her brother taught her. Not too hard, so she doesn’t hurt it, because that’s mean and you’re not supposed to hurt people or frogs. She makes a cage with her fingers, so that there’s room for the frog to breathe, and then she lifts it out of the mud with a grin.
“Look!” she says, turning around. “Look! I caught one!”
Her brother is not looking at her, though. He’s half-turned, one hand on a knife at his belt, and the other reaching for her.
“Evie,” he says, his fingers brushing caked on mud off her elbow. “Behind me.”
There are so many rules she has to follow, that sometimes she forgets them all—but Listen to Cole is the most important, and the one she never ever forgets. So she does as she’s told, making sure to hold the frog very gentle so it doesn’t get scared.
When she looks where Cole is looking, there’s a person she’s never met before, standing in the trees.
He’s an elf, like Mamae or Sera, and he’s dressed a little like the messengers that come and go for Mamae when she’s here—but there’s only two of them, and this stranger doesn’t look like either of them.
He’s staring at her. And he’s smiling a little, but it’s not a good smile. It’s weird and creepy, like when Uncle Varric is telling her stories, and he makes the Bad Guy voice.
She remembers another rule when they take her.
If you see anyone you don’t know, scream and don’t stop.
And she tries, really—she does. She bites their hands and when that doesn’t work she screams into them so hard that her throat hurts. But the sound doesn’t carry, no matter how hard she tries, and they don’t drop her no matter how much she kicks and squirms, so they take her, and no one can stop them.
They take her past a place where she feels something weird tingle on her skin, like walking through a curtain but the curtain’s not real. And then they walk for days, and days, and she remembers another rule—don’t eat or drink anything a stranger gives you—but she is so hungry and thirsty that she has to break it on the second day.
There are two people—the second one had done something to her brother, made it so he couldn’t move, and then they grabbed her and took her.
They haven’t told her if he’s okay or not—but she thinks it’s like with the frog. He’s a little uncomfortable because he can’t move, but they didn’t hurt him because it’s wrong to hurt people. Right?
Except they hurt her arm when they grabbed it. And they hurt her when they tied her wrists up, or when they put something in her mouth so she couldn’t scream—
Maybe they never listened to their brothers, when they were told that hurting people was wrong.
After the fourth day, they take her to a big mirror. And they say something that’s in elven—Mamae’s been teaching her a little—and then they walk her through it.
That tingles, too.
And then there’s a lot of steps, and a lot of running—and pretty flowers, but her eyes are all puffy (she wasn’t crying, she has all-er-gies) so she doesn’t really see them all. And more mirrors, which is annoying because she’s thinking that maybe there was a rule about always pay attention to where you’re going so you can find your way back but it’s a little hard to do that with mirrors, isn’t it.
Then they get to a place where there are more elves, and some of them are wearing very shiny armour like Uncle Thom or Aunt Cassandra do (except they look kind of silly), while some of them are not. She doesn’t get a good look at anyone, though, because the people who took her just rush her through, even though they’re panting for breath.
She has tried to tell them that if they put her down, they wouldn’t have to get tired from carrying her all the time. She thought that was very clever, but they didn’t buy it.
They take her into a big, big aravel—building, she thinks, and then she remembers Uncle Varric’s stories and thinks crumbling ruin instead—and they shout a lot in elven, which is annoying because she doesn’t understand it, but it sounds very fancy (which is a word her aunt Sera taught her, and is one she’s actually allowed to say without a scolding but it means something like mean people who dress up and think they’re better than everyone else.)
They finally stop in a room with a big table, and a bunch of people standing around it. They’re all wearing the shiny armour, which still looks silly, and there’s one in the middle with his back turned who has a big, white pelt over his shoulder. She’s not too good at guessing yet, but she thinks it’s from a wolf—it’s way too long for halla hair.
The man who’s holding her says something, and she knows it’s about Mamae because he says Inquisitor, and then he says da’len and the man with the wolf pelt stiffens.
The whole room goes very quiet, and everyone looks at her very quickly. And then they all start to talk again, quicker, faster, louder, so loud that it makes her ears hurt.
Except for the man in the wolf pelt, who lifts his hands from the table and turns around very slowly—like people do in Varric’s stories, when something scary or exciting is happening.
The man holding her puts her on the floor, and she almost falls over—they haven’t fed her today, and they’ve been running all night. She can definitely handle it, she’s four and a half, but she thinks anyone would be a little shaky, under the circumstances.
She looks up at the man in the wolf pelt as he looks down at her.
He looks very, very surprised, she thinks. And maybe a little sad—or happy? He’s looking at her like Mamae looks at her sometimes, when she thinks Evie’s not paying attention. Cole says that she’s overwhelmed when she does that, it’s not Evie’s fault.
She thinks of her brother, then—of him being frozen in place, trapped by magic—and she thinks that she’s hungry, and thirsty, but she already broke a rule when she took food from the strangers who took her and she knows she wasn’t supposed to and she didn’t mean to break the rule about screaming but she got so tired of it—
She wants her brother. She wants her Mamae. She wants someone to take this thing out of her mouth and untie her wrists and bring her to her Mamae, right this instant.
The entire room goes silent when she starts to cry.
All of a sudden, the man in the wolf pelt kneels, and takes the cloth out of her mouth.
She nearly chokes on it, she’s so surprised—maybe he’s like Cole and Mamae, he knows what she’s thinking—and he hushes her as she does, hiccupping and sobbing loudly into the emptiness of the room. Not trying to get her to be quiet—no, he just makes soothing noises, whispers gently, “It’s going to be alright,” over and over.
“I want—I want—”
“Your mamae,” he says, gently, when she can’t finish. “Of course. I will take you to her as soon as possible.”
He pauses, though, when he unties her wrists. And she feels his fingers touch the big ugly bruise that’s left over from them grabbing her.
His hands glow a little, like Uncle Dorian’s or Aunt Vivienne’s. And she remembers another rule too late—don’t let strangers use magic on you—but all he does is make the bruise go away, and her wrist doesn’t hurt any more.
His eyes glow, too. But she doesn’t feel any different from that, so she doesn’t worry about it. Elf eyes get all shiny in low light sometimes.
“Are you hurt anywhere else?” he asks, and he sounds so nice that she answers honestly. She shakes her head no, and he smiles so nicely when she does that she feels a little smile of her own, answering him back.
“Good,” he says. “Are you hungry? Thirsty? It’s a long trip back to your Mamae, and I want to make sure you’re feeling well.”
She sniffles a little, rubbing her arm where the bruise was, and nods.
He smiles again. “Would you like to walk with me, to get something to eat?”
That breaks a rule, she knows. But she’s very hungry, and this stranger said he’d take her to Mamae, so she nods.
He stands then, and reaches down, holding out his hand for hers. He kind of has to bend over a little, to make it work, but she reaches up high and his hand is very warm and gentle. He begins to lead her out the door that she came in—and there are two statues there that she didn’t notice before, so she cranes her head up to look at them.
“My name is Solas,” he says, and she looks at him instead. “What is yours?”
She knows it’s breaking a rule, but she tells him anyway, in between sniffling and rubbing at her eyes. “Evie.”
It doesn’t take anywhere near as much time to get home as it took to get to Solas.
Maybe it’s one of those funny time things, though, where when you’re having too much fun it goes fast. Because Solas is fun—a little sad sometimes, but most adults are anyway. He asks her lots of questions, and shows her magic just like Uncle Dorian, and he tells her all about the plants and animals that she doesn’t know very well yet.
He gets overwhelmed sometimes, just like Mamae. And Evie has to be patient with him when he does—she pretends she doesn’t notice, when his eyes get all shiny or his smile goes sad or he looks frightened. Sometimes he forgets how to talk, she supposes, because he goes all quiet for a while. That’s when she tells him about catching frogs with her brother, or about playing pranks with Aunt Sera, or playing pirates with Uncle Bull.
She notices really quick that he always goes quiet when she talks about Mamae, so she doesn’t do that a whole lot.
It only takes two days—maybe three, because she’s asleep when they get there. Woken up by the sound of her mother’s voice, calling her name.
“Evanura! Evanura!”
Solas has been carrying her in his arms, but he always lets her down when she squirms so she doesn’t mind. He does so now, but she’s still sleepy so she holds his hand as she walks, rubbing her eyes to wake up faster.
“Mamae?”
Her mother swoops in and gathers her up in her arms—and Evie clings to her neck, because Mamae can’t hold her so good if she doesn’t have her left arm on. But Mamae does, and she holds her so tight that Evie thinks she’ll never ever let go.
Evie doesn’t mind so much. If Mamae never put her down, she’d never have to go away.
“I broke a rule,” she says, sniffling into Mamae’s hair.
“Oh, da’vhenan,” her mother says. “It’s alright. You tried your best. It’s alright.”
Mamae pulls away eventually—puts Evie back on the ground, and looks at her all over. Mamae’s cheeks are all wet, and Evie reaches up to touch them, frowning.
“I’m just so happy, little heart,” she says, laughing. “Did they hurt you?”
To be honest, she and Solas have been having so much fun that she’s almost forgotten all about it. But Cole always says it’s important to tell the truth, especially to Mamae, so after a moment’s consideration, she nods. “Yeah. But, Solas made it better!”
Mamae stills. Evie can feel her fingers digging into her shoulders, just a little.
Eventually, Mamae looks up at Solas. Very, very slowly. And then she just… stares at him, over Evie’s shoulder, for so long that Evie half-turns to see what’s the matter.
Solas is standing a few paces back—his mouth hanging open, just a little, like he wants to say something but doesn’t want to interrupt. He’s looking right at Mamae, as she looks at him, and Evie thinks they both look overwhelmed.
No one moves, for such a long time that Evie begins to worry that there’s another bad person behind one of the trees, and Solas and Mamae are frozen like Cole was. But then Solas breathes, suddenly and sharply, and he turns a little, as if to go—
“Stay,” Mamae blurts into the silence.
For a moment, the only sound is the air rushing through the leaves above them. But then Solas’s shoulders relax, and he looks back to Evie and Mamae with one of those sad smiles adults have all the time.
Behind Evie, Mamae stands. “For the night, at least,” she says, gently. And then, so softly that Evie’s not sure Solas can hear, she adds, “Please.”
And he kind of laughs a little—just a little huff. But he sounds like when Uncle Dorian broke a rib, and came to stay for a while, and Uncle Bull would tell funny jokes like he always does but Dorian would complain, because it hurt too much.
“Are you certain?” he asks, after a while.
Adults are so weird sometimes.
“Yes!” Evie shouts, annoyed, and breaks from her mother to go back to Solas. She tugs at his arm until he follows after her, wide-eyed, and she starts dragging him in the direction of the river. “I wanna show you where we catch frogs!”
“Evie!” Mamae calls. “It’s the middle of the night!”
But she’s laughing, a little, so Evie knows she’s not really mad.
Cole meets them at the usual place by the river—smiling a little, under his broad hat, and he kneels down so Evie can hug him when she runs to him, splashing through the mud.
“I’m alright,” he tells her as she buries her face in his shirt. “They didn’t hurt me. I’m alright. Small, swimming—there are tadpoles, now. Want to see?”
She nods into his shirt—and then sniffles a little, before she pulls away.
“You should come too, Solas,” Cole says, without looking, as she takes his hand and he walks with her towards the water.
It takes a moment, but after a while she hears Solas’s footsteps as he follows—the space between each growing smaller and smaller every time.
After Mamae tucks her into her furs, and kisses her goodnight, she waits until she thinks Evie is asleep to slip from the aravel.
It’s too warm for all those furs, though—and she’s not tired, she’s had an exciting couple of days. She gets up to open the aravel door a little, to let the breeze in, and when she glances out she sees Solas sitting by the fire. Staring into it, his expression blank.
Mamae sits near him—leaving enough space for Evie to sit, but not anyone bigger.
“When’s the last time you slept?”
He jerks in place at the question—blinking rapidly, like he’s been staring too long and his eyes have dried out.
It takes him a long time to answer. “When I told you she was safe.”
“Solas…”
Evie swallows. There’s something… different about the way her mother says that. She doesn’t know if it’s good different or bad different. Overwhelmed doesn’t seem to be it, though. A little bit like when Evie gets mud on her clothes, but sadder.
They don’t talk for a while after that. Her legs get tired, so she kneels on the aravel floor, peering out through the tiny crack she’s made in the door and hoping they don’t look this way.
They don’t, though. They just sit near each other, and stare into the fire.
“How old is she?” Solas asks, so suddenly Evie jumps a little.
Mamae sighs. “I think you know how old she is, Solas.”
Solas closes his eyes. Takes a deep, deep breath—and then stands, suddenly.
“I’ve overstayed my welcome,” he says, in a kind of voice adults use when they saying something boring or important. “Forgive me. I will not intrude on your peace again.”
As he starts to walk away, Mamae says, “I won’t.”
He stops, but does not turn around.
Mamae is still looking into the fire. “I won’t forgive you for coming here, because—” She closes her eyes, opens her mouth and shuts it again. Her fists are balled in her lap. “Because you saved her.”
His answering laugh sounds far away. “For a time,” he says, like it hurts.
“I should be the one—” She bows her head. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I want you to come back and visit whenever you like.”
His shoulders straighten. “What do you want in return?”
And that’s when her mother turns to look at him—so Evie can’t see her expression. “We have some rules, here. No one talks about the war. About Fen’harel, or the fighting, or what might happen. You can come and go as you please, but you can’t bring anyone I haven’t approved, and—and her nameday is in Guardian, it’s nice if as many people she knows can be here as possible so if you can just… I don’t know…”
All at once, Solas smiles, and half-laughs, and starts to cry.
And—and Mamae’s crying too, Evie realises. Her shoulders are shaking and her voice starts to waver. “I wanted you here so badly,” she says. “I—I’m sorry. I wanted to tell you but I couldn’t stand the thought of her being used against you—I wanted you to come back because you wanted to, not because I blackmailed you—”
“Tel’abelas,” he says, all of a sudden rushing back to her.
She stands, and they embrace before the fire. Crying, both of them—and Evie thinks that maybe she should go out and make them stop, it’s all very weird.
Then she feels a cold hand on her shoulder, and she knows without looking that it’s her brother.
“It hurts but it helps,” he whispers. “Go to sleep, Evie. They need to talk.”
She takes one last look out the door—looking at her mother, arms wrapped around Solas, his face pressed into her hair—and Evie wonders, because she’s never seen Mamae act like that around anyone else.
But Cole whispers again, and she lets herself be led back to bed.