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The first time Flemeth meets the young Lavellan, she is sixteen.
Sixteen and world-weary, vallaslin that are no longer slave markings dark blue on copper cheekbones. Scabbed in places where they haven’t quite healed. Mythal’s, and not that she’ll admit it but there’s a tug of pride there, something nostalgic, something in her heart that is neither and both. She shoves the thought away, having no time for it.
She is sixteen and she has wandered away from the other hunters of her clan; she moves with a surety of someone twice her age, knows the woods and the trees without having to see them. Flemeth watches from the shadows and sees the gauntness of her cheeks, the way her leathers are just too loose. All these things Flemeth can see with heightened clarity as she sits in the branches, the guise of a red hawk about her shoulders.
The Dalish girl is tracking a wounded animal—one of the other hunter apprentices made a poor shot. It’s growing dark out, and the girl’s eyes are glinting green in the twilight. Not the best time for elves to be out, Flemeth knows—their eyes have difficulty adjusting in this in-between light and dark.
The girl is far past the shouts of her clansmen, telling her to forget the beast and come back. As a hawk Flemeth can hear it, fuzzy and indistinct, but the girl is too far away, too focused on the meandering trail of hoofprints and blood.
The girl’s lips move, air barely passing over her lips. A prayer to Andruil, no doubt, asking for swiftness, for silence, for skill with the bow at half-draw, the arrow between her fingers to fly true. It is not desperation that makes her fingers tremble, but pity. She will not leave even a beast to die a slow death.
How young, Flemeth thinks. How very, very young.
The second time, the girl is nineteen, and she is better fed now. Still a touch too thin, like so many of the people who wander, but her leathers fit and the bow that is strapped to her back is well-used, well cared for, joined by a pair of knives that shine in the sunlight.
It is midday, and this time Flemeth as a gull. She watches the Dalish girl as she runs off the path and onto sea spray-soaked rocks, the summer sun bringing a red sheen to the dark braid trailing behind her, turning her skin a dark bronze. Though the stones under her bare feet are slick, she moves between them with easy leaps and bounds, and the gull’s wings are the only thing that allows Flemeth to follow this new trail the girl cuts, right on the ocean’s edge.
She outpaces her fellow hunters, outruns the man she is pursuing and the girl he has in tow as they are forced to take the winding road. She meets up with the rough dirt road as it finds its way back down to the ocean’s edge, and her quarry rounds the corner to find her standing there, salt spray in her hair and on her toes, her arrow notched to her bow and her aim steady.
“Aevalle,” the girl the man is holding says. Like a prayer, like a blessing.
“Ma halam, shemlen.” Aevalle tilts her head to the side, just enough. “Let her go.”
An undeserved warning, and the man does not listen. He gets an arrow in his forehead for troubling the wrong Dalish clan.
That night, Flemeth watches through an owl’s eyes as Aevalle’s Keeper lectures her.
“You could have been killed!” the woman is saying. “Do we know who this man is? Where he is from? What if he has connections? What if he is a noble?”
Aevalle is seated by the fire. Nineteen, and now her hands are shaking as she balls them into fists.
“I removed the arrow before I rolled his corpse into the sea,” she says, her voice even and dangerously low. But her hands still shake, and Mythal knows this is the first time she’s ended a life that wasn’t for food.
The Keeper sighs. “Da’len,” she says, but the woman seated by the fire is no longer a child, this day. Though her pupils shine green in the dark, her eyes are dull, her expression forced passive.
The Keeper dreams of Mythal that night. The humans own this world. Understand them, and you will move safer through it.
Aevalle dreams of the light leaving the dead man’s eyes. But her friend is still alive when morning comes, smiling and bright, and although her dreams do not abate the mornings make them lesser.
Flemeth sees her a number of times throughout the years—she trades furs with a human woman, teachers her daughters a sweet and high Dalish song. She plays instruments and dances, and more than once Flemeth turns the eyes of an owl or a wolf or a wild cat away as she and a lover slip away into the night, trying to stifle their laughter.
“What do you think really happened?” she wonders aloud, lying in a woman’s arms and staring up at the crumbling wolf statue on the other side of the glade.
“I believe,” her lover whispers, kissing her bare neck, “we just had sex, lethallan.”
Not that, Aevalle mouths, but does not say.
She watches through the eyes of a fox as Aevalle slips into elvhen ruins, holds torches up to frescoes long crumbled and murals with most of their stones missing, presses her palm flat against their surfaces and stares at them with eyes full of wonder, of such great loss. As a cat lounging on a windowsill she watches Aevalle lean against a wall in a town, listening with pale knuckles and wide eyes the story of a man who destroyed a Chantry, and how the circles were falling.
“Twins!” her Keeper is saying, late that night, when it is only her and Aevalle up around the fire. “And at once. That makes six mages, da’len. Six!”
Aevalle is strumming on the gitar in her hands, loosely, without a true melody, her fingers tapping the smooth wood surface every once in a while. Less to make a rhythm and more to feel something solid, something structured.
“What’s two more mages?” she asks slyly, “when we’re only supposed to have three?”
The Keeper lapses into silence, listening to Aevalle’s uncertain rhythm. “What did you hear in the market today?”
Aevalle sighs. “The world’s gone to hell,” she says. She strikes the wrong chord, and it rings sharp, piercing through the night. Then, she whispers, “I think the Templars have bigger problems now than a Dalish clan with too many mages.”
“Elgar’nan,” the Keeper mutters.
“There’s only one god who can hear us still,” Aevalle says, playing once again. Something quick, deceptively happy. “And that’s not him.”
The Keeper scolds her for her blasphemy with a smile.
Aevalle makes easy friends with the elves of Wycome when their clan passes near. She learns dwarven drinking songs from the Carta, from travelling merchants, and she learns snatches of Antivan from an elf who visits their clan for a while—and a few other things. She finds a human mage in the woods, leg stuck in a bear trap, and brings him back to her clan until he is well enough to walk, and she learns of the circles and why they fell.
Flemeth watches, catches bits and pieces of this Dalish woman’s life through the eyes of a hawk, a bear, a mountain lion and once a meadowlark, when she feels particularly nostalgic. Sometimes she is the change in the breeze that pushes a twig just under a man’s foot, right when those twins are playing with magic they are not supposed to have, and Aevalle is watching them. Sometimes she is the howl of a wolf that frightens human refugees and leads them to cross the path of a fierce Dalish woman with a kind smile and a friendly song, who listens to their stories.
It takes more than a breeze or the cry of an animal to send Aevalle Lavellan to the conclave. It takes the disguise of an old elven woman, wrinkled and wheezing, in the marketplace of an alienage late at night.
“Hahren,” Aevalle says as she approaches, not knowing just how true the word rings.
She offers water, coin, and that last pelt she could not trade away, and Flemeth smiles to herself as she offers word of the gathering far to the south.
“My son will be there,” she says, and it’s not entirely a lie. “A foolish man, thinks he will change the world. Can’t see what he might find in this one.”
Something dark passes over this Lavellan’s eyes, something like certainty, and Flemeth knows without having to wait around where Aevalle’s heart will take her next.