Pinned with the same pin inside his coat or cloak or whatever it is brooding Wardens have in the way of summer outerwear:
Mr. Ellis,
Despite my ill advised tenure as an assistant in the Gallows gardens, I know nothing whatsoever on the subject and so trust your instincts entirely.
That said, recall from a few weeks ago our trip to investigate that rift which turned out to be a very narrow cave with an exceptionally angry family of badgers in residence. There was a particular little yellow flower growing near there which smelled similar to something in Kalvad which I would not find unpleasant. I believe it looked something like this.
Your Friend, W.A. Poppell
A rough illustration of the rudbekia follows; she is a draftsman and not an artist, but it isn't an altogether impossible to decipher drawing.
It takes a week, and several discussions with a few different merchants but Ellis has some success. It's a small amount of seeds, and he has heard enough about the plant to be hopeful about propagating more after a season. It does mean acquiring yet another set of pots to be tended to, but all in all, a success.
Without having enough time to find Wysteria before leaving for his shift on city watch, Ellis leaves the seed package pinned to a piece of parchment on the table.
Wysteria,
We'll see if these seeds come up before the weather turns. If not, we'll try again next spring.
It would be helpful if you could water the clay pots on the left side of the apple tree in the morning. I've been told these flowers need it in the beginning.
It requires a most serious rearrangement of her schedule and indeed her residency habits between the house and the room she still keeps at the Gallows (a fact she strictly does not divulge to Mr. Ellis). Nonetheless, the clay pots are watered as required. And while she has no particular skill or indeed even interest for the growing of things, there is something shockingly pleasant about spending a few minutes in the early morning before the day becomes quite so hot in the company of someone else's careful work. The lavender smells sweet. There are small green shoots growing in the planter beds. The garden is such a different place from what it once was just ten months ago.
The next note doesn't come attached to anything. It is just a small piece of parchment, prettily folded into the flat shape of a flower and set with his things. The room to write at its center is very small. In a spiraling pattern, it says:
Mr. Ellis. You are, I believe, rather well traveled. Is there a particular place which you recall as your favorite? - W.
The first reply he writes is the most honest: None of my favorite places exist anymore.
But Ellis feeds that scrap of parchment to the fire.
The answer comes along with a thick tome Ellis draws from his satchel and hands off to her at the end of a long evening when Tony and Fitz's voices are well out the door, voices receding. Thedas: Myths and Legends is a heavy book, and obviously newly purchased; the spine is unbroken. A folded piece of parchment opens to a page on Lake Calenhad.
Wysteria,
When I was a boy, some of my favorite legends were of Ferelden's first and greatest king, Calenhad. I have not seen any of the promised magic from the lake named after him, but my time spent on these shores were always peaceful.
If you are curious, I can try to find one of the books written about his life.
Are you thinking of a trip beyond what has already been discussed?
Typically, she is rather against the idea of starting any book - however long - in the middle, for the arrangement of all writing is rather like a holy thing in the world of academia. Someone put this book together, and they chose what order it came in, and if one is to understand a thing properly then it must be read in the intended order.
But it is a long book, and she is very curious. She cannot possibly have consumed the entire volume before her next note arrives. This one too is cleverly folded, this time into the rough silhouette of a chalice. It is less obvious than the flower, and so she has made some decoration on the one side to clarify the meaning of the shape.
('Each day, he drew a single cup full of water from the lake and carried it to the Formari at the top of the tower. By magic, each cup of water was forged into a single ring of the mail armor the Circle gave to Calenhad. In that armor, made from the lifeblood of the land itself, no blade could strike him, no arrow pierce him—')
The writing is contained to the chalice's cup portion, and is written in a series of undulating lines.
Mr. Ellis,
Remind me when next we have a properly free afternoon that I would like to discuss Lady Shayna's role and how she relates to Maferath. In the mean time, I would welcome any recommendation you might have with respect to further reading so that I might be well prepared. With respect to the question of further travel—I have no great ambitions at present, no. I simply found myself foolishly reflecting on the pleasure of visiting strange places for a short duration, for there is something satisfying in the guarantee that you will leave a place knowing more about it than you did when you first arrived.
With that in mind, I would happily consider any detour you might propose should there be any particular place you would like to see or recommend either to or from Orzammar. My very favorite places on holiday were always the ones we stopped at more or less on accident or thanks to a whim.
Sincerely, W.A. Poppell
(Thank you. It is something of a tradition in Kalvad for certain correspondence. There are many more accomplished young ladies in Kalvad whose mastery of the art would put these very rudimentary attempts to shame. Please bear with me as I experiment.)
Having already resolved to learn courtly dances, Ellis does not learn how to mirror the folding of his letters.
But he does linger over a map in the library, finger walking the route between Kirkwall and Orzammar, and thinking of what lies between and whether or not Wysteria, Tony and Fitz fit into any of the places he walked through over the course of his travels.
The note is left the next day, folded in half with a spring of St. John's wort weighing it down.
Her response, given to him on top of a stack of three books stolen from the Gallows library which she begs him to return for her ('I can't. I have had them for months and if I return them now they will know for certain that I took them and not simply that they were badly reshelved') is not cleverly folded. She needed the space to write and indeed must have been running out of paper for this note (if such a word can be applied) runs across two pages, and must first be read from top to bottom and then turned by degrees for she has scrawled to fill the surrounding margins as well:
Mr. Ellis,
To tell you everything about Kalvad would be a very challenging prospect indeed, so you must tell me if there is a particular aspect in which you are most interested. For now, I will tell you about Bellmoral.
First, you should know the the 'l' is fundamentally silent; take caution that if you pronounce it as anything more complicated than 'Bemora', you will be known instantaneously for a mysterious visitor from Elsewhere and will face no end of scrutiny and curiosity from anyone you might come across there.
With a fast horse you might ride south to Sommerset in a three days, but to travel there comfortably is really the undertaking of closer to five by way of carriage, and so a vast majority of all trade and business and does not go to the capitol but rather makes itself known by way of Draycott, a port city which might be reached in half the time and is very friendly to any young lady interested in very nearly the latest fashions and news from abroad. So you see, Bellmoral is very much a place of country living but is not so tragically remote as to be compared to the likes of Chaepstow or Stawford who are unlikely to have even heard of Iugul, much less that there has been a war going on there.
(That is a joke. I'm sure they can't be so ill-informed as all that.)
Now, Bellmoral—It is predominantly a place for the raising of livestock and tenant farming. Many, many years ago it was part of the grand holdings of a very wealthy old family, but was broken up during the Great Amendments, and so now is dotted with smaller estates of rather less ancient houses, one of which is my family's and where I lived until my apprenticeship. I suppose it is not wholly unlike the Bannorns in that way, although my father has no title (hence I am a Miss, and not a Lady or anything like it). Kalvad is certainly rather more like Ferelden than any other place in Thedas, although having been to the Orlesian countryside I can imagine it might be slightly closer to that in terms of climate and so on (subtracting, of course, the general scars of war and burning fields and so on and there has not been fighting on the Summer Isle proper in forty years).
The summers are mild and the winters cold. The Choral River runs through it and is almost always too bitter to swim in, though I have done so in late August without being overly troubled. To reach my father's house, you must travel west from the village, turning up a long lane of hedgerow until you arrive in a square shell gravel courtyard. It is a fine old stone house with only some ivy and a reasonably pleasant garden with two or three large trees beside it. Should you ever find yourself there, I strongly recommend making your way to the third stairwell landing. There is a small circular window there and through it you can see the wood at the estate's edge, and much of the valley for quite a ways past it, including Jack's Crossing which is a bridge I nearly put my mother into a grave over on account of falling off it when I was a baby who could not be made to stop climbing any manner of rock or railing if not held down by force.
It is a tolerable enough place if you enjoy quiet, and so you would be correct to think that I spent many a day there unamused to the very edge of senselessness. Please forgive this very dull account. Now that I've written all of it, I'm rather of the mind to start over and describe something more exciting (the Church of Kalvad, for example, is not so fascinating an institution as the Chantry, but I think it would be an interesting point of comparison. Our gods are somewhat similar to the Maker, but there is no Andraste et cetera et cetera), but alas!
Let this be a lesson to you that you must be more specific about your requests or find yourself on the receiving end of a very long, very boring education about a place with hardly any merit save that it is pretty and the people living in it somewhat pleasant.
Is the trade off for this note the return of the books? Ellis does, along with a small payment that isn't discussed otherwise.
He reads the letter thrice over. It feels like he's uncovered something deeply personal, though some aspects of her description call to mind aspects of his own life he hasn't thought about in a very long time. The letter is carefully folded, and added to the others.
A few days later, attached to a trio of sketches for fencing:
Wysteria,
I didn't find any of your letter boring. In some ways, I'm sorry I won't be able to visit Bellmoral myself.
But I should apologize, so let me ask a better question: what specific thing do you wish I'd asked you about?
Also, if you could pick between the three styles of fencing. I'd like to replace the rusted gate leading out into the alley.
On the back of the third sketch ('I rather like this one, Mr. Ellis,' she says when returning it), is written the following—
Mr. Ellis,
What an equally impossible question! I suppose the first thing that comes to mind would be, What did you do there, Wysteria? for that is the easiest to answer and of course is simply that I was educated. Most of the practical work of my schooling was spent in the textile yards of Sommerset. They have great spinning wheels there driven by a kind of network of enchantments which require regular maintenance by apprentice level scholars from the College.
We have four kings. Parliament is a collection of Lords and a small house of untitled commoners. My father makes things. My uncle is in government. If I were at home right now, I would not in fact be on the Isle at all but would be in the Continental Kalvad, specifically in Imperial Iugul with my Master. He had just been ordered there for diplomatic work.
In the end, a week later, gate installed and garden beginning to bloom, a letter is left behind when Ellis leaves for the day. Again, folded in half, but this time weighted down by a small dog figure carved from dark wood.
Wysteria,
I suppose you would ask about our dogs. Most people are curious about Ferelden's dogs, or they know some joke about Fereldans and dogs and want to share it.
Keeping dogs is a tradition going back to the very beginning of Ferelden. They are valued as members of the family, and appear in most of our mythology. It's said they would defend and protect Ferelden from werewolves in the very earliest days of our history.
Mabari are the most famed, I think. They're made for war, and train to fight alongside us. I was never fortunate enough to have one myself, but I've known a few in my time.
If I find some relevant books of lore, I'll pass it along. In the meantime, tell me about your spell work.
On an especially sweltering afternoon as Ellis is leaving to attend to a shift of guard duty, Wysteria reminds pauses in the process of coating a piece of paper in a highly poisonous substance (it's fine; she's wearing gloves) to call after him, saying, "Oh Mr. Ellis! If the day is too warm, I believe there may be something in your satchel which will help."
In his bag is a small parchment wrapped shape. It is the same small dog carved from dark wood. Scrawled on the parchment is—
Hold this and say 'Good dog.'
-W.A.
And in reply, the surface of the carved dog chills like a river stone. It wears off after a few hours, but should last the length of a guard rotation at least.
There is some ridiculous element to speaking aloud to a small figurine. But the pay off is worth it.
Whenever Wysteria arrives the next morning, the dog has been returned, along with a small bundle wrapped in an embroidered tea towel. Upon inspection, it's a number of pastries with a hastily written note instructing: for tea. Beneath the bundle is a piece of parchment folded into fours.
Wysteria,
Clever. And a help. Standing around in the sun was much more tolerable with your help. Thank you for the loan.
The tea towel and indeed a selection of the pastries (the ones which she doesn't eat herself in the interim) will see immediate use in her wooing of Valentine de Foncé's pocket book, and so is most appreciated. She says thank you in person when she next sees him.
And for a while—a series of days, or weeks, punctuated by sampling and closing Rifts, or division work, or missions spent briefly abroad—there is are no notes passed remarkable enough to warrant mention. And then, tucked alongside whatever he is using as a bookmark in whatever book he is currently toting around with him, appears an elaborately folded silhouette of a paper dog with two dot eyes and blacked in ears. It isn't meant to be unfolded; the obvious place to begin would be by pulling on its tail to free it from what appears to be a major fold, but all that accomplishes is causing the dog's mouth to open. It's a sweet, childish thing and comes with no accompanying note.
The new addition isn't found until later that evening, Ellis propped against the headboard of his bed and opening his book to have paper fall into his lap.
His urge is to put it into his pack along with the rest of her letters, but he props it on the side table beside the candle. It remains there for weeks after, likely until the weather turns and Ellis clears the side table of all items.
Shortly after the dog appears in his book, Ellis leaves a collection of Fereldan mythology with several stories featuring Calenhad Theirin earmarked. The note is folded on in half length-wise and set inside the front cover. A bouquet of daisies accompanies it.
Wysteria,
I came across this recently and thought you might be interested.
All save one of the daisies live the life most bouquets are doomed to: they are plunked into a convenient cup, decorating the kitchen table until they shrivel and die and eventually are tossed out into one of the garden planter beds.
But the exception spends a day behind her ear and comes back to the Gallows with her where it lives its brief life on the side table in her half of the room she keeps there.
A battered old book, well used and clearly purchased second hand, appears under his work gloves. On the inside page is written directly—
Dear Mr. Ellis,
Forgive me if you've read this already. It is a fictional account of rediscovering Calenhad Theirin's famed blade, Nemetos. I haven't read it myself, so you must recount the very best parts to me if you enjoy any of the text.
And Ellis does recount the best parts to her over the course of an afternoon, the pair of them idly playing a two-person game of cards Ellis half-remembers and is content to abide by Wysteria's embellishment to the rules. It turns out Ellis is a good storyteller. (Patiently answering Wysteria's questions in stride without breaking the flow of the story itself might have something to do with it.)
He leaves at dusk, after passing off a smaller book to her. The cover is faded beyond reading, but the pages are intact, if yellowed with age.
Wysteria,
This is a collection of stories about mabaris and their owners. Excuse the condition, and mind the binding.
It takes such a long time for her to return the book that it is all but guaranteed Wysteria has left it somewhere and forgotten about it entirely.
Only that isn't it at all. When the book is finally returned—simply set carefully beside his things—one sunny afternoon as he works in the garden, the purpose behind the extraordinarily long hold becomes clear.
Some repair has been done to the binding—the top layer of the spine peeled carefully back, a thick paper marbled with shades of darkening blue and bright ribbons of white used to reinforce it and then covered again with that tattered rectangle of the original spine so that only the edges of that marbled papers and its tabs folded over the inside of either board are visible. It is not quite like folding a letter into an elaborate shapes, but it isn't so far removed from it either. She isn't certain she should have done it. And so from some corner planter box where she is perched and meant to be watching while Mr. Dickerson's enchanted snake slithers through stalks of flowers and under the broad splay of the lavender bush, Wysteria instead watches his reception of it from the corner of her eye.
It has not yet occurred to him to be worried about what he'd left for Wysteria. If she has misplaced it within the house, it will turn up in the course of Fitz's re-cataloging of the library. And if it does not—
Then it is gone, like all the rest. (Is the book an heirloom simply because it is the only thing that Ellis carried out of that house with him, forgotten in his back pocket?) He tells himself it is not important. It was an undeserved boon to carry it with him for so long.
But there is a sharp, undeniable pang in his chest when he lifts the book from where it has been laid beside his satchel and mace and recognizes the title. For a moment, it is hard to draw a breath. His hand passes gently over the newly-applied paper, the carefully replaced spine, before he puts the book into his satchel.
When he crosses the garden, his hand settles between Wysteria's shoulder blades before he leans down to drop a kiss to the top of her head.
"That was very kind," he tells her, without continuing: and undeserved. "I'm grateful."
In the shadow of the narrow little yard as the enchanted snake winds its rustling way through the planter, Wysteria tilts her face up to look at him.
She'd been halfway through her impromptu book surgery, with the spine cut into pieces and the pages in the delicate process of being resealed, when it had occurred to her that perhaps this battered old thing was precious somehow—as if by changing any part of it, she might be ruining it as a token. After all, the book's pages are very faded and the edges of the cover rather rounded out and banged blunt from the wear of travel. Maybe these things matter. But of course by then it had been rather too late to do anything about it other than carry on and hope for the best.
Some measure of her relief must show clearly in her expression, in her careful (upside-down) examination of him.
"Are you? You must think nothing of it. It really took no time at all," is naturally contradicted by how long she has been in possession of the little book. A printer was consulted. An essay on the subject was read. She is a very poor hand at marbling paper and had ruined the first few sheets of stock she'd attempted to color.
She knows how it must seem and so veers away from that point with all expediency.
"No time at all" is not the truth. Ellis doesn't need to call her on that, because it changes nothing. Wysteria did something kind for him when she hadn't needed to, and Ellis understands exactly what it is to want as little attention called to that as possible. Is this garden not something similar?
At the question, Ellis reaches over to draw one of the buckets over to sit on. He has some sense that whatever she's going to ask might be something he'd rather not answer, but on the off chance it's about the book, about one turn of phrase Ellis had read a thousand times but never paid particular mind to while Wysteria had plucked it out to consider how it relates to the Chantry or some historical event or how it may be an allegory for this or that, he'd like to be comfortable.
"I think so," he answers her, elbows set on his knees, hands folded loosely between them. "I can't promise I have the answer you're looking for."
Which tends to be the case sometimes, when they talk about literature.
Asking in that way, she ought to have her question teed up and ready to strike the moment he agrees to make an attempt.
The trouble of course is that she has a half dozen. A full dozen. A long series of miscellaneous inquiries which she has saved up like some frugal old bat who can afford to buy whatever she likes but has been hemming and hawing on what is actually worth the coin.
(Oh, to be a penny pinching dowager, she thinks. The whim is unrelated and distant.)
What she settles on, with a rising sensation of foolishness and a slight grimace is—
"Is everything... well with you?"
The view from the corner of her eye is very sharp when she cares for it to be.
Something in his expression settles slightly, as if bracing against the inquiry.
There are two answers to the question. Ellis could simply opt for the one closest at hand: he is well in this moment, healthy and out of danger of immediate injury. But if Wysteria is asking, it is because she has discerned some wrinkle.
But this knowledge doesn't guide Ellis in how to navigate it.
"Do I seem unwell?" he asks finally, with the air of a man fumbling in the dark, seeking some touchstone to guide himself forward.
"No, no. Nothing like that at all," she is quick to say, her attention veering away from him to the snake in the planter. She reaches out to touch along the tip of its tail, the creature's muscular little body rippling under her fingertip.
(Evidently direct exposure had been the right course to take in tackling certain aversions; congratulations on your discerning eye, Mr. Dickerson.)
"It's just the polite thing to do on occasion. To ask someone how they are. And also, it occured to me that other day that some time ago you had seemed slightly dissatisfied with the circumstances of your association with—Well. With Mr. Stark and myself. I was somewhat distracted at the time and failed to properly return to the subject to see it settled, but I suppose later to be better than never. Particularly now that there is Mr. Fitz, and de Foncé has elected to be so rude, and as we are all of us are being rather demanding of your time and expertise with respect to the Orzammar affair. That's all."
It takes Ellis a moment to think back, to remember Wysteria's tears in the alcove of the library and what he had told her then. It is still true.
His gaze drops briefly to the hands, the ground beneath their feet. The grass will need some attention here, he thinks vaguely before wrenching his focus back to Wysteria.
"I'm not dissatisfied with your friendship, or Tony's," Ellis tells her. Maybe he should be. Maybe he should have avoided being led into this situation at all, or at least ashamed of himself for not extricating himself from it. "You aren't troubling me with any of this, Orzammar or otherwise."
Well, not troubling in the way she means. Ellis is habitually troubled by how close experiments often veer towards danger, but that's a separate matter.
"None of it's to do with you," Ellis presses, sincere if not particularly illuminating. "I'm lucky to have your friendship."
Wysteria cuts a glance in his direction, something there on the tip of her tongue that she puts on reserve as she instead moves to fetch the snake from the planter bed. Like a well trained dog, the reptile answers Wysteria's simple command of 'Come here,' by bending back over itself. It slithers up into her hand and coils about the wrist.
With the snake transferred from the planter into her lap, she finds the thought still pressing despite how inconsiderate it is. Can't have a mysterious past without some hard limits lying around,' Mr. Stark had said of their mutual friend, but she has found more poked holes than barriers.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
A rough illustration of the rudbekia follows; she is a draftsman and not an artist, but it isn't an altogether impossible to decipher drawing.
no subject
Without having enough time to find Wysteria before leaving for his shift on city watch, Ellis leaves the seed package pinned to a piece of parchment on the table.
no subject
The next note doesn't come attached to anything. It is just a small piece of parchment, prettily folded into the flat shape of a flower and set with his things. The room to write at its center is very small. In a spiraling pattern, it says:
no subject
But Ellis feeds that scrap of parchment to the fire.
The answer comes along with a thick tome Ellis draws from his satchel and hands off to her at the end of a long evening when Tony and Fitz's voices are well out the door, voices receding. Thedas: Myths and Legends is a heavy book, and obviously newly purchased; the spine is unbroken. A folded piece of parchment opens to a page on Lake Calenhad.
no subject
But it is a long book, and she is very curious. She cannot possibly have consumed the entire volume before her next note arrives. This one too is cleverly folded, this time into the rough silhouette of a chalice. It is less obvious than the flower, and so she has made some decoration on the one side to clarify the meaning of the shape.
('Each day, he drew a single cup full of water from the lake and carried it to the Formari at the top of the tower. By magic, each cup of water was forged into a single ring of the mail armor the Circle gave to Calenhad. In that armor, made from the lifeblood of the land itself, no blade could strike him, no arrow pierce him—')
The writing is contained to the chalice's cup portion, and is written in a series of undulating lines.
no subject
But he does linger over a map in the library, finger walking the route between Kirkwall and Orzammar, and thinking of what lies between and whether or not Wysteria, Tony and Fitz fit into any of the places he walked through over the course of his travels.
The note is left the next day, folded in half with a spring of St. John's wort weighing it down.
deep breath
puts this in a frame
He reads the letter thrice over. It feels like he's uncovered something deeply personal, though some aspects of her description call to mind aspects of his own life he hasn't thought about in a very long time. The letter is carefully folded, and added to the others.
A few days later, attached to a trio of sketches for fencing:
no subject
no subject
I don't like to talk aboutI lived inI wouldn't have wanted you toIf I were there nowA fair amount of parchment is ruined.
In the end, a week later, gate installed and garden beginning to bloom, a letter is left behind when Ellis leaves for the day. Again, folded in half, but this time weighted down by a small dog figure carved from dark wood.
no subject
In his bag is a small parchment wrapped shape. It is the same small dog carved from dark wood. Scrawled on the parchment is—
And in reply, the surface of the carved dog chills like a river stone. It wears off after a few hours, but should last the length of a guard rotation at least.
no subject
Whenever Wysteria arrives the next morning, the dog has been returned, along with a small bundle wrapped in an embroidered tea towel. Upon inspection, it's a number of pastries with a hastily written note instructing: for tea. Beneath the bundle is a piece of parchment folded into fours.
no subject
And for a while—a series of days, or weeks, punctuated by sampling and closing Rifts, or division work, or missions spent briefly abroad—there is are no notes passed remarkable enough to warrant mention. And then, tucked alongside whatever he is using as a bookmark in whatever book he is currently toting around with him, appears an elaborately folded silhouette of a paper dog with two dot eyes and blacked in ears. It isn't meant to be unfolded; the obvious place to begin would be by pulling on its tail to free it from what appears to be a major fold, but all that accomplishes is causing the dog's mouth to open. It's a sweet, childish thing and comes with no accompanying note.
no subject
His urge is to put it into his pack along with the rest of her letters, but he props it on the side table beside the candle. It remains there for weeks after, likely until the weather turns and Ellis clears the side table of all items.
Shortly after the dog appears in his book, Ellis leaves a collection of Fereldan mythology with several stories featuring Calenhad Theirin earmarked. The note is folded on in half length-wise and set inside the front cover. A bouquet of daisies accompanies it.
no subject
But the exception spends a day behind her ear and comes back to the Gallows with her where it lives its brief life on the side table in her half of the room she keeps there.
A battered old book, well used and clearly purchased second hand, appears under his work gloves. On the inside page is written directly—
no subject
He leaves at dusk, after passing off a smaller book to her. The cover is faded beyond reading, but the pages are intact, if yellowed with age.
no subject
Only that isn't it at all. When the book is finally returned—simply set carefully beside his things—one sunny afternoon as he works in the garden, the purpose behind the extraordinarily long hold becomes clear.
Some repair has been done to the binding—the top layer of the spine peeled carefully back, a thick paper marbled with shades of darkening blue and bright ribbons of white used to reinforce it and then covered again with that tattered rectangle of the original spine so that only the edges of that marbled papers and its tabs folded over the inside of either board are visible. It is not quite like folding a letter into an elaborate shapes, but it isn't so far removed from it either. She isn't certain she should have done it. And so from some corner planter box where she is perched and meant to be watching while Mr. Dickerson's enchanted snake slithers through stalks of flowers and under the broad splay of the lavender bush, Wysteria instead watches his reception of it from the corner of her eye.
There is no note.
no subject
It has not yet occurred to him to be worried about what he'd left for Wysteria. If she has misplaced it within the house, it will turn up in the course of Fitz's re-cataloging of the library. And if it does not—
Then it is gone, like all the rest. (Is the book an heirloom simply because it is the only thing that Ellis carried out of that house with him, forgotten in his back pocket?) He tells himself it is not important. It was an undeserved boon to carry it with him for so long.
But there is a sharp, undeniable pang in his chest when he lifts the book from where it has been laid beside his satchel and mace and recognizes the title. For a moment, it is hard to draw a breath. His hand passes gently over the newly-applied paper, the carefully replaced spine, before he puts the book into his satchel.
When he crosses the garden, his hand settles between Wysteria's shoulder blades before he leans down to drop a kiss to the top of her head.
"That was very kind," he tells her, without continuing: and undeserved. "I'm grateful."
no subject
She'd been halfway through her impromptu book surgery, with the spine cut into pieces and the pages in the delicate process of being resealed, when it had occurred to her that perhaps this battered old thing was precious somehow—as if by changing any part of it, she might be ruining it as a token. After all, the book's pages are very faded and the edges of the cover rather rounded out and banged blunt from the wear of travel. Maybe these things matter. But of course by then it had been rather too late to do anything about it other than carry on and hope for the best.
Some measure of her relief must show clearly in her expression, in her careful (upside-down) examination of him.
"Are you? You must think nothing of it. It really took no time at all," is naturally contradicted by how long she has been in possession of the little book. A printer was consulted. An essay on the subject was read. She is a very poor hand at marbling paper and had ruined the first few sheets of stock she'd attempted to color.
She knows how it must seem and so veers away from that point with all expediency.
"Can I ask you something, Mr. Ellis?"
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At the question, Ellis reaches over to draw one of the buckets over to sit on. He has some sense that whatever she's going to ask might be something he'd rather not answer, but on the off chance it's about the book, about one turn of phrase Ellis had read a thousand times but never paid particular mind to while Wysteria had plucked it out to consider how it relates to the Chantry or some historical event or how it may be an allegory for this or that, he'd like to be comfortable.
"I think so," he answers her, elbows set on his knees, hands folded loosely between them. "I can't promise I have the answer you're looking for."
Which tends to be the case sometimes, when they talk about literature.
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The trouble of course is that she has a half dozen. A full dozen. A long series of miscellaneous inquiries which she has saved up like some frugal old bat who can afford to buy whatever she likes but has been hemming and hawing on what is actually worth the coin.
(Oh, to be a penny pinching dowager, she thinks. The whim is unrelated and distant.)
What she settles on, with a rising sensation of foolishness and a slight grimace is—
"Is everything... well with you?"
The view from the corner of her eye is very sharp when she cares for it to be.
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There are two answers to the question. Ellis could simply opt for the one closest at hand: he is well in this moment, healthy and out of danger of immediate injury. But if Wysteria is asking, it is because she has discerned some wrinkle.
But this knowledge doesn't guide Ellis in how to navigate it.
"Do I seem unwell?" he asks finally, with the air of a man fumbling in the dark, seeking some touchstone to guide himself forward.
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(Evidently direct exposure had been the right course to take in tackling certain aversions; congratulations on your discerning eye, Mr. Dickerson.)
"It's just the polite thing to do on occasion. To ask someone how they are. And also, it occured to me that other day that some time ago you had seemed slightly dissatisfied with the circumstances of your association with—Well. With Mr. Stark and myself. I was somewhat distracted at the time and failed to properly return to the subject to see it settled, but I suppose later to be better than never. Particularly now that there is Mr. Fitz, and de Foncé has elected to be so rude, and as we are all of us are being rather demanding of your time and expertise with respect to the Orzammar affair. That's all."
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His gaze drops briefly to the hands, the ground beneath their feet. The grass will need some attention here, he thinks vaguely before wrenching his focus back to Wysteria.
"I'm not dissatisfied with your friendship, or Tony's," Ellis tells her. Maybe he should be. Maybe he should have avoided being led into this situation at all, or at least ashamed of himself for not extricating himself from it. "You aren't troubling me with any of this, Orzammar or otherwise."
Well, not troubling in the way she means. Ellis is habitually troubled by how close experiments often veer towards danger, but that's a separate matter.
"None of it's to do with you," Ellis presses, sincere if not particularly illuminating. "I'm lucky to have your friendship."
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With the snake transferred from the planter into her lap, she finds the thought still pressing despite how inconsiderate it is. Can't have a mysterious past without some hard limits lying around,' Mr. Stark had said of their mutual friend, but she has found more poked holes than barriers.
None of it's to do with you, suggests—
"But there is something. Troubling you."
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sticks bow on this
sticks second bow on top of first bow