Flint's hm of a reply is a singular low note in the close confines of the tent. A placeholder for—
"You're dripping," he says, setting aside the half polished boot on the rush mat floor. It's a somewhat nebulous barrier between them and the mucky ground.
That does stop him—the boot or the observation, either one, and Marcus lets out a breath of some irritated snap of a comment that doesn't come together into words fast enough.
Raises an arm partway beneath the broad sleeve of his cloak, dropped again to his side. "It's raining."
He's aware, suggests the flat unscratched look that meets Marcus' scuffed out breath. Straightening, Flint fetches a square of folded linen from the foot of the nearby low camp bed. The fabric carries that distinct mottled look and the scent that comes from the sort of woody oil used for softening leather and keeping the likes of griffon tack supple. Flint offers it out. There's something expectant in the gesture.
Let's have this conversation like adults, shall we?
It's an effective means of stealing away the momentum he'd gathered from landing amongst the camp until now. The serious and intent set of Marcus' expression changes only subtly, but there's a note of grudging ascent as he takes the cloth from Flint's hand. Grasps it as he undoes his cloak completely and finds a place to hook it, where the puddle it'll create is somewhat inoffensive.
Underneath, layers of leather, no sign of injuries or forgotten gouts of blood. He wipes his hands dry and then his face, and doesn't feel a need to fill the silence as he does so.
That's apparently satisfactory enough for Flint to fetch his boot back up off the reed mat, setting the shoe across one thigh with the heel jammed against the inside of his knee. The horsehair brush is reclaimed. One hand goes back down the neck of the boot. By the time Marcus has finished, Flint has resumed buffing the boot's toe. The whisk whisk of the bristles make for a steadier, more present rhythm than the rain falling against tent canvas.
It's practiced work. He can look at Marcus, meet his eye, easy enough while he does it.
"Cavel"—not the Templar of the group that Marcus had flown out with, but the Fereldan swordsmistress—"Said as much about what you all found out there. What else did you discover by staying behind?"
This news is satisfactory. That it's Cavel giving her report means some willingness to move past recounting what they'd found again, as if maybe the story of finding an Abomination alone in the woods and killing it could be somehow corrupted through a Templar's telling.
Who knows. But Marcus nods to this, content to stay standing with his muddy boots at a respectful distance. An absent knocking of toe to ground, to rid them of some of the muck.
"We followed the damage of its path," he says. "It was good fortune we found anything, in this weather. The griffons caught the scent. There were bodies, three of them." The cloth is tossed aside, and he goes to fish something out from a pouch buckled to his belt. "Common folk, no weapons of note on them, not dressed or appointed like Venatori. One of them wore this."
The item he shows is jewelry, for all intents and purposes. Wood and bone, tokens, touches of paint. "Hedgemage charms. It might be Rivaini, but I don't think it is, they didn't look that way. There was a staff, too, built with lyrium."
"This is a poor place for an uneducated mage to find themself," goes without saying. Though the scrubby mudhole that has become Antiva's southern border as it defends itself from Tevinter incursion is, arguably, a bad place for most anyone.
(Apostate, he thinks a moment too late. That's what they call those mages here in the south. Or used to, a long time ago now.)
Flint turns the boot, the horsehair brush buffing black wax to a dull glow along the boot's heel. The earthy smell of it manages somehow to be distinct in the confines of the tent, largely undiluted by the weather searching out various canvas seams.
"Did the deaths seem to be the work of the Abomination, or something else?"
So Marcus pauses over it, looking down at the hedgemage charms in his hand. Either the roads are being ravaged by the demons summoned by Venatori, or it's some mage enclave surviving out here, one or even some of their own turned Abomination, or—and likely closer to the truth—some muddled situation in between. Sometimes, what it looks like is what it is.
"There seemed to be a scrap," without too long lingering in his pause. He speaks quietly by default, but it suits him to do so now, as if the driving rain outside isn't enough to hush the conversation from outside, or drive away anyone who could linger and listen in. "Between the Abomination and them. Magic lingering about the place. I think they were trying to stop it and it killed them."
He curls his fingers back around the charm, an idle fidget at the leather cord.
"We might find them by day, if there's more."
There's more. A little cluster of apostates weren't taking a random walk through Antivan war-torn wilderness.
Here, his attention drops from Marcus and the motion of the man's hands about the cording. Flint takes stock of the boot between his knees, examining it to be certain the shine he's worked into the leather is consistent. And so he can think. He'll need to send the right people to go looking, if that's indeed what he decides to do.
"What are the odds we find more Abominations when we do that looking?"
The boots are just going to get dirty again the moment he steps off the rush mat and out into the weather, he decides. So the horsehair brush is set aside. Living with it would seem to be shaping up into something of a theme.
"What are the odds that a vagabond group of mages turn Abomination, is what you're asking."
Marcus maintains his respectful distance off the mat, rain soaked and mud spattered, but his tone is familiar. Maybe, in the moment, quiet as he tends to be and nuances masked with the driving sound of rain above them, it's difficult to discern if its the kind of familiar that gestures to a recent history of private conversation, or further back, snippy comments across a desk.
If it's not what Flint is asking, it's what others will ask, he's sure. He continues. "Depends on approach. If we come in with a fight, they'll defend themselves."
That prompts a look from under the shadow of Flint's brow, sidelong and skeptical. Is that what he'd been asking?
Isn't something he says. Instead, Flint rights the boot from between his knees and sets it down alongside its mate. The horsehair brush has a place in the little kit box at his heel. Stowing it, he says, "I have some concerns that approaching them at all may look like hostility. Do you have a suggestion for how we might discourage that impression?"
The look is met with an even one in return, insists on his own correct interpretation, feet planted and arms folded. If Marcus thinks Flint the kind to jump to wild conclusions about mages and the danger of their continued freedom, well, it's likely they would not have gotten to be where they are.
All the same. Fresh off an argument on the field, the phantom sensation of a hasty splash of Silencing still prickling at the back of his mind, a fast flight through the rain, and it seems prudent to talk of the topic in the most direct way possible.
"No large hunting parties. No Templars or swords. Scout from the air and approach from the ground with two, three at most. Mages."
"All right." That comes easily enough, as if his own thinking had been trending in that direction already. What comes after—
Flint raises a hand. Scratches at the outer corner of his brow with his smallest fingers, flat faced silver ring winking in the dull lamplight of the tent. Where there's one abomination, why not two? Unkind a consideration as it is, there's no point in pretending it is beyond possibility. Madness travels like a fever in close quarters, and what quarters are closer than the company of unwelcome travelers looking to thread the needle between the Venatori, rifts, patchwork militia, and Maker only knows what else?
"So then you and Tasia,"—the healer who'd helped peel Marcus out of a shattered Lowtown backlot. "In case they need assistance. And Rennit, for if they don't."
The man in question might be a sword, but at least he doesn't look it.
Nods once as Flint begins, resettling his weight between his feet as if the transition from reporting to being directed requires a physical shift. Maybe it does. Different muscles engaged, different ways of carrying tension. Perhaps Flint will give him orders to be carried out when sun breaks again, and after that's done, there can be some other sort of shift.
A shift towards the part of Marcus that would prefer, more often than he would care to admit, to find an ease in crossing the space between himself and Flint, stepping onto the thatching, silence complaints about it. Cast aside the terrible weather and his own mood, and find a new one.
But Rennit though. That starting sense of unwinding pauses.
A tip of his head, indicating the path Rennit had taken out. "The mage hunter." The Starkhaven accent is a good one for conveying skepticism.
"I believe he has some experience with that work, yes," he says, as if the man's reputation isn't one of those much bickered about conversation topics over which Riftwatch's company loves to pick and prod. It's even possible that it doesn't escape Flint that electing to send the man for this work may very well make for more talk even if all goes perfectly well.
But that's a concern earmarked for some hours later, and manageable as a consequence. It is, in some respect, a very optimistic problem to prepare for in any regard. That clear note of skepticism, however—
Directly, then.
"We obviously can't send a Templar or a bowman with magebane arrows. Rennit is a reasonable safeguard and will make no trouble if you find none."
Flint has settled there on the low stool, a hand at each knee and the set of his heels firm on the rush mat. There is some patient, unmovable quality in both this and his tenor. Boats will rock. It's their nature.
"Rennit will see trouble whether we find it or not."
Maybe. Does Marcus know this man better than Flint does? It is a guarantee that the Commander of Riftwatch has exchanged more words with him than Marcus has, perhaps has observed more of his temperament, his capabilities, whatever track record of decisions he has made.
What Marcus knows is he's the kind of person who felt it was good and correct to kill apostates, and what could have possibly happened to change this? A brief calculus follows—
"I can take care of it without."
"pacing" I say whenever I write the world's shortest tag
The steady, straight look Flint gives him is its own kind of skeptical—a forfending thing, in keeping with seeing Marcus' understandably muddy boots off the reed matting. Yes, but—
An underslept and snippier response than what Marcus might have indulged in however many months ago, but it comes out, impatient to get through the potential briar between them.
"I believe your affinities are well known." Is blunt. Not an insult, just a statement of fact. Water is wet; southern bears travel in packs; Marcus Rowntree is somewhat infamous as a friend to (most) mages and rather less than that when it comes to everyone else.
(If Flint has done any study of that hierarchy in these last months, he has elected to set the information aside. Not because it's irrelevant. It's merely not pressing.)
"If your suspicions prove true, these people have my sympathies. But I can fathom a situation where you and Tasia might extend them more patience then they can be trusted with. There could be others suffering similar effects, and it would benefit us all—these mages included—to have someone who knows what too far gone looks like, and whose reputation won't be damaged by acting on it."
Anger is not exactly an unfamiliar emotion—not even in the past six hours, the past thirty minutes. Feeling a spark of it now is oddly alien, anyway. Disorienting for it. There have been frustrations and hurt feelings and uncertainties. Irritations. They are both very annoying men, actually, only barely inoculated to each other.
But now, a snap of short temper, and it is strange to feel it pull in Flint's direction. Strange enough that his instinct is to leash it for a moment, consider its arguments.
Says, anyway, "My judgment, then," low and graveled rather than a bark, but something sharper at the edges. The thing Flint doubts, if not his abilities.
It's been some time since he'd had word of the first half of this adventure from Cavel. There had been a spark of irritation then, too—half formless, not entirely logical—when he'd gotten word of the party's split. Cavel had made the whole thing sound rational, but Flint has heard enough arguments on the crystal network to know what one might have sounded like under these circumstances to be annoyed by it. Naturally, Marcus had gone on. Conveniently, the parting of ways had seen the Templar of their party go the opposite direction. Nevermind what they might have found on the other side of whatever trail they'd followed.
But he isn't still stewing over it now, and that sharp burr in Marcus' timbre only reminds him of the spark rather than rekindling it.
"That's not what I said." Technically. "Your strategy for its use can be an issue. Those are different things."
Is it more or less annoying that he says it so bluntly, lacking all heat? It's clearly not an opinion he's only just formed. It's not for arguing over. It just is.
He draws in a longer breath at this first part. A natural aggravation for when semantics get brought into the thing.
A fiery temper doesn't need added heat to burn brighter. Kindling will do just as well, neutral and dry and thrown in without intention. "And you won't send a Templar because it would make a bad impression," Marcus says, heat entering his tone. Volume, for anyone who might be darting by the tent during the downpour or waiting beneath the awning. He would like to pace. There isn't the room. "Not that a Templar's judgment ought disqualify him, and nor a mage hunter's."
Because, of course, Marcus would disqualify them. Unnecessary, worthless, an added complication.
Raised voices, even from the Commander's office, are not uncommon within Riftwatch. It is a somewhat argumentative organization at the best of times and often in spite of what constitutes as rank. This, and Flint is some years—practically decades—removed from any world where the mere whiff of insubordination warrants instantaneous reprisal lest some flexion allow for the rot that ruins a perfect dictatorship.
It's fine. Marcus' frustrations don't scratch at an animal thing in him which has been bred to go heavy handed with provocation. The thing which sometimes longs to see the more incompetent members of their company beaten with a stick and the dangerous ones disposed.
"No," he says. He doesn't set his jaw, and then unset the muscle again. He understands how Marcus would be frustrated by this, Flint makes himself think instead. The hurried tempo of the rain on tent canvas makes it difficult to keep the thought in a straight, orderly line. "I'm telling you to defer to mine."
It's almost enough. Flint is giving him an explicit order, at least with regards to tomorrow's proceedings, how this problem he's personally discovered and brought back to him is to be dealt with. Something in him attuned to hierarchy of a kind he has had practice putting faith in wants to relax to it. Enough bickering, because the decision is already made. Accept it and go. He's done it before.
Practiced too in doing the opposite. Some other part of him that says he is not permitted to rest or relax if it means giving a single inch one way or another as far as mages are concerned. Even these ones, whose names he doesn't know, whose faces he won't recognise.
If these two impulses battle each other for preference, it happens in no time at all. "But you don't understand him," Marcus snaps. This, too, can't have come from nowhere. "Men like him, men that believe what they believe. Who've killed mages for doing what we're hoping we find, Abominations or no."
Flint, a brick wall. Calm, seated. Aggravating for it.
Something crackles at the base of his skull. He's aware of the sound more than he is the thing that causes it—the line of his spine straightening, the faint slant of shoulders becoming uncurved and the angle of his face shifts in response to that snapped protest as if it were a thing Flint might take on the chin or set between his teeth. Given the angle of the tent's canvas and the lopsided cast of the lamp within it, a somewhat uncharitable shadow lends itself to Flint's face—
Something in that has hooked at him. Patience wrenches a degree in the direction of stubborn.
In reply: a forced moment where Flint's hands shift there at his knees, squeezing and then releasing in quick succession instead of nipping back. It smacks of a compulsive, physical check. Something to balance against the metallic taste of irritation that's found his back teeth.
"All right." Doesn't sound like agreement or I understand. It sounds like a hovering shoe waiting to drop. "Then why don't you tell me how you imagine men like Rennit being made useful."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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"You're dripping," he says, setting aside the half polished boot on the rush mat floor. It's a somewhat nebulous barrier between them and the mucky ground.
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Raises an arm partway beneath the broad sleeve of his cloak, dropped again to his side. "It's raining."
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Let's have this conversation like adults, shall we?
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Underneath, layers of leather, no sign of injuries or forgotten gouts of blood. He wipes his hands dry and then his face, and doesn't feel a need to fill the silence as he does so.
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It's practiced work. He can look at Marcus, meet his eye, easy enough while he does it.
"Cavel"—not the Templar of the group that Marcus had flown out with, but the Fereldan swordsmistress—"Said as much about what you all found out there. What else did you discover by staying behind?"
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Who knows. But Marcus nods to this, content to stay standing with his muddy boots at a respectful distance. An absent knocking of toe to ground, to rid them of some of the muck.
"We followed the damage of its path," he says. "It was good fortune we found anything, in this weather. The griffons caught the scent. There were bodies, three of them." The cloth is tossed aside, and he goes to fish something out from a pouch buckled to his belt. "Common folk, no weapons of note on them, not dressed or appointed like Venatori. One of them wore this."
The item he shows is jewelry, for all intents and purposes. Wood and bone, tokens, touches of paint. "Hedgemage charms. It might be Rivaini, but I don't think it is, they didn't look that way. There was a staff, too, built with lyrium."
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(Apostate, he thinks a moment too late. That's what they call those mages here in the south. Or used to, a long time ago now.)
Flint turns the boot, the horsehair brush buffing black wax to a dull glow along the boot's heel. The earthy smell of it manages somehow to be distinct in the confines of the tent, largely undiluted by the weather searching out various canvas seams.
"Did the deaths seem to be the work of the Abomination, or something else?"
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So Marcus pauses over it, looking down at the hedgemage charms in his hand. Either the roads are being ravaged by the demons summoned by Venatori, or it's some mage enclave surviving out here, one or even some of their own turned Abomination, or—and likely closer to the truth—some muddled situation in between. Sometimes, what it looks like is what it is.
"There seemed to be a scrap," without too long lingering in his pause. He speaks quietly by default, but it suits him to do so now, as if the driving rain outside isn't enough to hush the conversation from outside, or drive away anyone who could linger and listen in. "Between the Abomination and them. Magic lingering about the place. I think they were trying to stop it and it killed them."
He curls his fingers back around the charm, an idle fidget at the leather cord.
"We might find them by day, if there's more."
There's more. A little cluster of apostates weren't taking a random walk through Antivan war-torn wilderness.
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Here, his attention drops from Marcus and the motion of the man's hands about the cording. Flint takes stock of the boot between his knees, examining it to be certain the shine he's worked into the leather is consistent. And so he can think. He'll need to send the right people to go looking, if that's indeed what he decides to do.
"What are the odds we find more Abominations when we do that looking?"
The boots are just going to get dirty again the moment he steps off the rush mat and out into the weather, he decides. So the horsehair brush is set aside. Living with it would seem to be shaping up into something of a theme.
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Marcus maintains his respectful distance off the mat, rain soaked and mud spattered, but his tone is familiar. Maybe, in the moment, quiet as he tends to be and nuances masked with the driving sound of rain above them, it's difficult to discern if its the kind of familiar that gestures to a recent history of private conversation, or further back, snippy comments across a desk.
If it's not what Flint is asking, it's what others will ask, he's sure. He continues. "Depends on approach. If we come in with a fight, they'll defend themselves."
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Isn't something he says. Instead, Flint rights the boot from between his knees and sets it down alongside its mate. The horsehair brush has a place in the little kit box at his heel. Stowing it, he says, "I have some concerns that approaching them at all may look like hostility. Do you have a suggestion for how we might discourage that impression?"
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All the same. Fresh off an argument on the field, the phantom sensation of a hasty splash of Silencing still prickling at the back of his mind, a fast flight through the rain, and it seems prudent to talk of the topic in the most direct way possible.
"No large hunting parties. No Templars or swords. Scout from the air and approach from the ground with two, three at most. Mages."
Obviously.
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Flint raises a hand. Scratches at the outer corner of his brow with his smallest fingers, flat faced silver ring winking in the dull lamplight of the tent. Where there's one abomination, why not two? Unkind a consideration as it is, there's no point in pretending it is beyond possibility. Madness travels like a fever in close quarters, and what quarters are closer than the company of unwelcome travelers looking to thread the needle between the Venatori, rifts, patchwork militia, and Maker only knows what else?
"So then you and Tasia,"—the healer who'd helped peel Marcus out of a shattered Lowtown backlot. "In case they need assistance. And Rennit, for if they don't."
The man in question might be a sword, but at least he doesn't look it.
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Nods once as Flint begins, resettling his weight between his feet as if the transition from reporting to being directed requires a physical shift. Maybe it does. Different muscles engaged, different ways of carrying tension. Perhaps Flint will give him orders to be carried out when sun breaks again, and after that's done, there can be some other sort of shift.
A shift towards the part of Marcus that would prefer, more often than he would care to admit, to find an ease in crossing the space between himself and Flint, stepping onto the thatching, silence complaints about it. Cast aside the terrible weather and his own mood, and find a new one.
But Rennit though. That starting sense of unwinding pauses.
A tip of his head, indicating the path Rennit had taken out. "The mage hunter." The Starkhaven accent is a good one for conveying skepticism.
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But that's a concern earmarked for some hours later, and manageable as a consequence. It is, in some respect, a very optimistic problem to prepare for in any regard. That clear note of skepticism, however—
Directly, then.
"We obviously can't send a Templar or a bowman with magebane arrows. Rennit is a reasonable safeguard and will make no trouble if you find none."
Flint has settled there on the low stool, a hand at each knee and the set of his heels firm on the rush mat. There is some patient, unmovable quality in both this and his tenor. Boats will rock. It's their nature.
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Maybe. Does Marcus know this man better than Flint does? It is a guarantee that the Commander of Riftwatch has exchanged more words with him than Marcus has, perhaps has observed more of his temperament, his capabilities, whatever track record of decisions he has made.
What Marcus knows is he's the kind of person who felt it was good and correct to kill apostates, and what could have possibly happened to change this? A brief calculus follows—
"I can take care of it without."
"pacing" I say whenever I write the world's shortest tag
The steady, straight look Flint gives him is its own kind of skeptical—a forfending thing, in keeping with seeing Marcus' understandably muddy boots off the reed matting. Yes, but—
shorter, i say
An underslept and snippier response than what Marcus might have indulged in however many months ago, but it comes out, impatient to get through the potential briar between them.
a gold star for each of us
(If Flint has done any study of that hierarchy in these last months, he has elected to set the information aside. Not because it's irrelevant. It's merely not pressing.)
"If your suspicions prove true, these people have my sympathies. But I can fathom a situation where you and Tasia might extend them more patience then they can be trusted with. There could be others suffering similar effects, and it would benefit us all—these mages included—to have someone who knows what too far gone looks like, and whose reputation won't be damaged by acting on it."
we can split one next time
But now, a snap of short temper, and it is strange to feel it pull in Flint's direction. Strange enough that his instinct is to leash it for a moment, consider its arguments.
Says, anyway, "My judgment, then," low and graveled rather than a bark, but something sharper at the edges. The thing Flint doubts, if not his abilities.
efficient!!
But he isn't still stewing over it now, and that sharp burr in Marcus' timbre only reminds him of the spark rather than rekindling it.
"That's not what I said." Technically. "Your strategy for its use can be an issue. Those are different things."
Is it more or less annoying that he says it so bluntly, lacking all heat? It's clearly not an opinion he's only just formed. It's not for arguing over. It just is.
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A fiery temper doesn't need added heat to burn brighter. Kindling will do just as well, neutral and dry and thrown in without intention. "And you won't send a Templar because it would make a bad impression," Marcus says, heat entering his tone. Volume, for anyone who might be darting by the tent during the downpour or waiting beneath the awning. He would like to pace. There isn't the room. "Not that a Templar's judgment ought disqualify him, and nor a mage hunter's."
Because, of course, Marcus would disqualify them. Unnecessary, worthless, an added complication.
"You're asking me to defer to it."
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It's fine. Marcus' frustrations don't scratch at an animal thing in him which has been bred to go heavy handed with provocation. The thing which sometimes longs to see the more incompetent members of their company beaten with a stick and the dangerous ones disposed.
"No," he says. He doesn't set his jaw, and then unset the muscle again. He understands how Marcus would be frustrated by this, Flint makes himself think instead. The hurried tempo of the rain on tent canvas makes it difficult to keep the thought in a straight, orderly line. "I'm telling you to defer to mine."
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Practiced too in doing the opposite. Some other part of him that says he is not permitted to rest or relax if it means giving a single inch one way or another as far as mages are concerned. Even these ones, whose names he doesn't know, whose faces he won't recognise.
If these two impulses battle each other for preference, it happens in no time at all. "But you don't understand him," Marcus snaps. This, too, can't have come from nowhere. "Men like him, men that believe what they believe. Who've killed mages for doing what we're hoping we find, Abominations or no."
Flint, a brick wall. Calm, seated. Aggravating for it.
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Something in that has hooked at him. Patience wrenches a degree in the direction of stubborn.
In reply: a forced moment where Flint's hands shift there at his knees, squeezing and then releasing in quick succession instead of nipping back. It smacks of a compulsive, physical check. Something to balance against the metallic taste of irritation that's found his back teeth.
"All right." Doesn't sound like agreement or I understand. It sounds like a hovering shoe waiting to drop. "Then why don't you tell me how you imagine men like Rennit being made useful."
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