Biscuit

(Lothering-Redcliffe)

Emma had expected it was meant as hyperbole and panic. Not like there’d literally be no survivors in Lothering. Before they left, it was starting to seem real. With miles between them and the recently captured town, and days ahead of the horde, survivors were thin already.

Here on the road the darkspawn ignited a mill, or some barn adjacent, or perhaps simultaneously all of them. They were excessive. The origin was academic by the time it was visible from the road.

Emma counted heads. Morrigan. Leliana. Sten, who took up the space of approximately two people. Muffin, half a person. But no Alistair.

She looked back at the building. She just had a feeling he’d go in there. She hoped she was wrong.

Stupid, stupid, stupid—

She started walking toward it. Slowly. To get a better look. It was one of the storage structures near a little Chantry, stone lower half, timber upper. The timber was moist enough to explode occasionally. Muffin had no such ambivalence. He was already outside the door, or what remained of the door, barking powerfully.

The sensible approach was: don’t go in. She had little water. She wasn’t enough of a primal mage to know when a flashover would occur. Her fire resistance from rock armor would protect her from ambient heat for a limited period, but a burning building was not ambient heat, it was—it was more protection than Alistair had on him—she was considering how long he could wait with the smoke inhalation when—

He walked out of the building, but before they saw him emerge from the door, they heard the baby screaming.

“It does sound like him,” said Morrigan.

Alistair was mostly unharmed. Very fixable blistering, which was almost secondary information. He was holding it against his chest with his off-hand in a way that suggested he had needed the sword arm free on the way out.

“Here,” he said, moving toward Emma immediately. The baby was sooty but fine, and very upset.

“No.”

“My armor is going to be too cold in about thirty seconds—”

Emma knew the answer immediately.

“Leliana.”

The former chantry sister was already moving. She took the baby with both hands and a high pitched sound, tucking it against her immediately.

“There was a woman,” he said. “She—I think she—” Alistair stopped and looked at his hands.

Emma looked back at the building. The second floor was fully involved now. This is where the calculation she was working on would have met a natural end.

Leliana surpassed them with the baby. Within minutes, it was no longer making terrified noises, and instead making cranky ones. Leliana made noises back. They appeared to reach some kind of agreement.

The Wardens exchanged glances. Emma made a gesture behind Leliana’s back, as if delivering her final point in a lecture. Alistair shrugged. Then that conversation was over.

“We have to move,” Emma said.

“Yes.” He looked at the baby, which Leliana was now singing to, quietly, in Orlesian. “What do we do with—”

“We’re going to Redcliffe anyway.”

“Maybe we can find somewhere safe on the way there.”

Sten was watching this exchange. He looked at the baby. He looked at Alistair. He said nothing.

“Sten,” Alistair said.

“Hm.”

“Have you ever seen a baby before?”

A pause. “Yes,” said Sten, looking back at it. “It is merely the smallest human child I have encountered.”

The child introduced a lot of imminent problems, but for now, only seemed to care about being held incorrectly, which Leliana prevented. Sudden loud noises: Sten prevented more of by existing as an ambient threat than he induced by shuffling his rather large frame and throwing a stick around for Muffin. It was very interested in the contents of Emma’s field kit, despite having few occasions to notice Emma at all.

It traveled in Leliana’s arms for most of the first day. And with Alistair for part of the second, while he was in leathers. He seemed to feel like that required explanation.

“It’s not that I want to,” he said. “He keeps reaching for the straps. If I don’t carry him, he’ll get all grabby and fall on his face—”

Emma looked at him. He had the same sort of mysterious aptitude Leliana demonstrated. The baby wrapped its hand around one of his fingers and was looking up at him with the unfocused intensity of a creature that had not yet developed object permanence.

“He likes you,” Leliana said, in that special high-pitched voice she had in it’s proximity. Emma found it grating.

“He likes anything that moves,” he said. “It’s not selective.”

“Mmm.”

Sten walked behind them at a distance that suggested he was maintaining surveillance on the infant rather than proximity to it. Emma suspected this was not incuriosity but the result of concluding that the answers would not resolve the underlying conceptual problem.

She decided to hang out with Sten. They shared a pipe. When Alistair approached with the child, she shooed him, refusing to expose herbal smoke to the tiny lungs. And then she spent more time smoking than she usually did.

At camp the second night, Morrigan bird-ed away when asked if she wanted to hold him, an interaction which Alistair found very funny and repeated. The baby was handed to him in the evening, who sat with it by the fire making different noises than Leliana did. Less musical, more conversational.

“What do you think his name is,” he said.

“It doesn’t have one yet,” Emma said. “Probably.”

“We should call it something.”

“We should call it nothing. We’re dropping it off somewhere.”

“That seems—”

He looked at it.

“I’m going to call it Biscuit,” he said.

“You’re not.”

“Only to myself. Internally.”

“Biscuit. And Muffin,” repeated Sten. “Is it human custom to share designations between dog, infant, and pastry?”

“Yes,” said Emma, completely straight-faced, as Alistair cracked up behind him.