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You can ride a horse, can't you?

Or a mule. Something with more or less four legs that walks on the ground. I suppose the breeding isn't important.

Yes, I know how to ride a horse.

Good. Because I'd rather not go about this work by griffon, never mind what Yseult would prefer.

[Besides, a whole slew of them flew off yesterday night. Not that she's meant to know that.]

How do you feel about surveying enemy supply lines?

Griffons are conspicuous. [ More importantly, they're large enough to eat a man, never mind dropping one thousands of feet to his death. ]

But I suppose it depends on the location of the line.

[ How muddy is it? ]

It doesn't, actually. As I'd be too mortified to look at the ground if we were to fly over.

[Heights. Blechk.]

But we'd be working our way along the coast. Noting the passage of smugglers. Run-ins with Tevinter soldiers. Cold nights. Charmingly dilapidated seaside flop houses.

[ There is a necessary pause for him to weigh this against his current work, his plans for further fiddling. But his sense of duty is only briefly consulted.

This is simple arithmetic, after three years. ]

Alright.

[ And back to his note-taking, barely a break in the line. ]

When would we depart?

I'd thought to spend the night in Kirkwall and then be off first thing in the morning. There's a production of The Hatter of Val Foret that I'd like to see before going.

Would that suit, or have you baby nugs to wean?

I could bring them along.

[ This is a threat. ]

Should I pack armor?

I like nugs.

[This is a dare.]

And I don't think it'd hurt. Better safe than.

Mm.

[ Does she?? ]

I’ll make arrangements for them.

[They're bald and wrinkled. What's not to like?]

Very good. I'll see to securing the horses and equipment. Bring a spare shirt or two. I suspect we may get at least as far as Ostwick and they have excellent gambling parlors.

[ ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) ]

There's a bay roan mare I prefer if she's available.

[ Surely he deserves a coastal vacation adventure with Mrs. Fitcher. As a treat. He is already thinking about shirts. ]

Her name is Captain.

Aye, aye.

[Yes, a coastal vacation cleverly disguised as work. This has nothing to do with casually flitting out of the immediate reach of the Gallows should the quiet rumor—which she'd been passed by one of the laundry girls and then confirmed for herself by delicately rifling through some less than public papers—that a rescue party has been raised to pursue two missing members of Riftwatch.

Marcus and Julius aren't her concern. It's the fact that they haven't simply disappeared, mysteriously never to be seen or heard from again which is. That means something has gone wrong, and it would be best to arrange for a thumb's breadth of distance in her favor until it's clear what it is and that it means to fly over her head.

Likely it will. This is hardly the first time she's sniffed something rotten on the air and made herself scarce. No, they will have a grand time meandering off to Ostwick. They will make a little money there, or maybe lose a little which is sometimes more pleasant.]

I'll save you a slice of standing room at the theater should you finish your work early. The shit one in Lowtown. Not the one with the good boxes. Otherwise, the stables tomorrow first thing.

[ However far away, Richard raises his eyebrows to himself, self-satisfied with the prospect of leaving Riftwatch in the lurch while he capers up the coast with a partner in crime motivated singularly by her desire to spend time with him.

Maybe life here isn’t so terrible. ]

I’ll meet you at the stables.

[ He neatly spares himself the hustle of packing and making arrangements to store his gear before the show. ]

Captain is ready enough to hand the following day. Alongside a mule named Howard, who has big black tipped ears and a very red coat, they make their way out of Kirkwall with remarkably little fanfare and even less in terms of long-term camping gear. She makes it a point not to sleep on the ground if there's any alternative. Tents, it seems, are for suckers who can't find their way to various backwater inns.

Not that, a series of days later, they find themselves close to such an establishment. Instead, they are perched at the edge of a cliff face in Sebring the contents of some cove marring the coastline. Fitcher has already set down her spyglass, bored with the lackluster results of her attention. Having laid on her front in the summer-deep foliage for some hours, she now rolls over to her side—no, all the way to her back—and tucks the glass into her broad belt with a dismissive twist of the wrist.

"Have you ever made love outdoors?"

That's not a suggestion. It's just a question.

Unless— she fires Silas a sidelong look which consists mostly of eyebrows.

There are lines of work that require bedding down on bare ground regularly enough for even humans to build up a tolerance. Those that don’t accumulate sleep debt and dodder off cliff edges or onto spear points or into blocks of carnivorous jelly. Particularly in the Free Marches, where there aren’t many creatures in the night worse than wolves, the swift onset of Silas’ snoring has been as much of a barrier to sleep as the hard-packed earth.

Thoroughly windblown and some days past caring about the starch of his collar or the press of his vest, he’s studying a book-bound map in his lap where he’s sat in the shade of a scrubby tree. The hand-drawn pathways are not of the coastline but of the Crossroads.

He loses the stubby joint at the corner of his mouth to the salt air a beat after he turns to look at her, lying as she is. The loss doesn't phase him.

“Not exactly,” could mean anything in this context. He doesn't elaborate.

But he is considering it now, according to his own eyebrows.

"My, very mysterious."

Lying there in the crinkling grass, she kicks one booted ankle over the other and begins to casually rifle through the pockets of her riding pants. It's only after checking the majority that Fitcher recalls the pipe she's after is tucked into the band of the broad brimmed felted hat in the grass beside her.

"How comes your map?"

The weather is thick and warm when they're not being scraped by the wind. And there's an ache low at the base of her spine that's both more and less bad if she lies flat. And if no one comes to call at this landing soon, she decides, they'll gather their things and move studiously along. There's a bath in her near future. She's manifesting it.

“I haven’t identified any patterns of substance.”

Why should he, it’s chaos.

He’s not long in watching her rifle before he turns back down to it, but his focus is displaced. Enough so that he folds the cover over and presses it flat after another moment or two spent over the same pair of pages. He has his satchel nearby to file it into.

Keeping low enough not to break the brush line requires effort; he shifts onto the pivot of one knee to scoot himself over through the beachgrass, stains and clinging seeds be damned. The view here, he can see now, isn’t any more exhilarating than his own was four or five feet yonder.

“How goes your watch?”

Far above, a hawk wheels in lazy circles over the cove, keeping a weather eye where he hasn’t bothered.

Fitcher's hmm as she knocks flakes of burnt tobacco from the pipe's bowl makes for a decent substitute in lieu of repeating 'No patterns of note' back at him.

"I thought I spotted a glimmer of sails on the horizon there a half hour off, but it may have been a trick of the light. It's not resolved into anything since."

She offers him the pipe and the tobacco pouch from her belt out to him. He's better oriented to pack it without the wind making a mess of things.

"If not for our friend's certainty"—the word of a gnarled old fisherman she'd cheerfully gossiped with some days prior—"I might be tempted to say this particular landing is no longer be in use and be done with it."

“I could send Thot out to take a look.”

Surely that’s what she’s here for, too far adrift for her shadow to whisk across the cliffside.

Closer by, Silas has a light touch, the pipe taken and turned around in his fingers for him to examine the hollow of the bowl. He takes the pouch also, less careful in his handling save to keep it upright where he tucks it in at his side, away from the wind.

As a matter of course, out here in the direct sunlight, he nicks up her hat to fit it down over his own dome before he sets to packing.

“How often have you made love outdoors?”

"What a shocking question," has just the faintest tint of playful faux-scandalized color to it as Fitcher folds her idle hands over her middle and allows her eyes to slide mostly shut against the sun.

Honestly. What kind of scoundrel asks such a thing of a respectable person such as herself?

(Yes, she supposes he might send Thot out. The idea of being certain enough to happily pack up and move directly on to the next little village en route, where they might come by a lukewarm bath and a bed or two, is tempting indeed.)

"Do we consider rooftops outdoors?"

He cuts a glance to her beneath the brim of her hat with tobacco pinched between his fingers. Consider him Ribbed.

A sharp whistle calls his bird back from her circling over the shoreline; she’ll thump down into the tall grass nearby while they talk, the world’s bristliest pine cone, all coal-dark feathers and green eyes. Bits of dried seed fluff cling in her pantaloons, her crest.

“By definition,” is the answer to Fitcher’s question.

Thot bustles airborne again without a word said between them.

“I nearly made love on a rooftop once.”

The fhwumping landing of the bird stirs her only slightly—a cat, contemplating a nap in a bar of sunlight, flicking its tail in consideration of something it might ordinarily dedicate more focus to. Fitcher has only barely cracked one eye back open by the time Thot is on the move again, bade off by whatever silent communication has passed between man and fade-formed beast.

Instead, she turns her face from the rustled beach grass to Silas alongside. His hands move just beyond the edge of the hat's cast shadow. The sun is warm through the thin fabric of her rumpled shirt. She can feel the residual salt of sweat and ambient grit on her cheek and in the wrinkles about her eyes as she produces a toothy smile.

"With who?"

“With another Rifter, during the Satinalia fire.”

Recent, then, in the scheme of things, no undue tension to his knuckles curled to pack tobacco down between layers. He’s intent on his work, the pipe tilted just so.

“His name was Vanadi.”

Later that same evening he’d found Fitcher in a cramped inn in Kirkwall and folded himself up into one of her blankets on the floor.

crystal;

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Re: crystal;

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https://i.imgflip.com/2l448b.gif

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I promise to bump us to prose when I time skip this

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me trying to reproduce how my phone autocorrected "observing" so badly: ???

me reading it 5 times and assuming sebring must be some thedas town ive never heard of

my phone possessed by the spirit of david gaider

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