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Solas paused as he picked up the jar of gold paint. Tilting it to the side, he frowned and then held it up in the light. That was not paint. He lowered the jar of honey with a sigh. Solas looked among the other jars, hoping Sera had merely hidden his dark yellow in the back, but it was missing.
“Cole,” he requested to the empty air. “Do you have a moment?”
“Time in little pieces, it is too big for people to understand otherwise. Better if you share them. Yes, I have a moment.” Cole perched on Solas’ desk and Solas handed him the jar. “Arrow sharp in my side, hurts to breath, can’t get air, can’t get air.” Cole looked up from under his hat. “Yes, the healers can use this to make honey poultices. She might die anyway, but this will help. Thank you.”
“You are most welcome,” Solas smiled.
“They’re in the garden, under the sun,” Cole told him, letting the words hang behind him as the spirit vanished.
Setting his brushes in water, Solas stood and passed quietly through the main hall, his bare feet whispering against the stone. He slid through the crowd of minor nobles and tradesmen without a ripple, a jackfish cutting smoothly through a trout pond.
Outside, the garden air was no less magically warmed than inside, but the sunshine was still winter-weak and the grass was cool against his toes. There was no sign of Sera among the plants, but Solas was unsurprised that the spirit had meant the figurative sun as opposed to the literal one. He made his way to the small chapel, an apse recessed into the curtain wall, and pushed the door quietly open.
“Bugger!” Sera landed on the ground from somewhere, having evidently heard him anyway. A yellowed paint brush was in her hand, but Solas’ jar of paint was in Inquisitor Lavellen’s.
“Inquisitor?” Solas said, surprised.
“Fenedhis.” The inquisitor looked guilty for a moment before he grinned ruefully. “Garas quenathra Solas?”
“Ugh,” Sera scowled. “Talk sense. All this elfy elvish stuff gives me hives.”
“I came for my paint,” Solas obliged her. He finally caught sight of what they had been doing when he looked from the Herald back to Sera and spotted a splotch of yellow on the statue of Andraste. They had painted a mustache similar to Dorian’s on the figure’s head, one side curling up further than the other. Solas sighed again. “I had hoped not to find you engaged in some sort of vandalism, but I must confess that I did not expect your accomplice. Might he not have been better served guarding the door?”
Sera shrugged. “Needed help reaching. But good idea, yeah. You keep watch while we finish up.”
“Me?” Solas protested, but Sera was already climbing back onto the Inquisitor’s shoulders and they still had Solas’ paintbrush and his paint. He kept an eye on the door and tried not to think about the implications of three elves vandalizing the statue of Andraste, one of them the Herald of Andraste himself... whose skin was forever stained with Andruil’s ownership. Solas did not understand these Dalish, who foreswore nearly everything else in the name of freedom and then marked themselves with bonds of slavery. But, of course, they did not understand themselves.
Sera, rather neatly, added a goatee to Andraste’s new adornment, only getting a little of the paint in Inquisitor Lavellan’s already golden hair. When she finished, she jumped down and cocked her head to take in her handiwork. Lavellan plucked Solas’s brush from her hand as she admired their efforts. Turing to Solas, Lavellan offered him his belongings with an impish grin on his lined and wind-chapped face that made him look of an age with Sera.
“My thanks,” Solas said, drily.
“The credit truly goes to Sera,” the Inquisitor said. “But you might as well come and have a drink with us as we wait for our mischief to catch up, now that you are already complicit with the Fen’Harellen and I.”
“The what?!”
Sera and Inquisitor Lavellan both looked at him with surprise. “Fen’Harellen,” the Dalish elf repeated. “Little trickster. It was something Haren Lannis used to call me as a child: the little Dreaded Wolf.”
Solas stared. A haunting monster and a troublemaker, this was his legacy. That and the green light on Lavellan’s palm.
Sera’s grin interrupted Solas’ frown. “I like that one!” she said as she looked at the expression on his face.
Fenedhis.