Chapter Text
On paper, it seems as though the Valo-Kas and the Bull’s Chargers will get along. They are both mercenary groups, and they both have a Qunari at the head of each group. This is the first mistake the Inquisitor makes though.
The line between Qunari and Tal-Vashoth is less of a thin sliver and more of a vast impasse.
When Adaar hears about the Bull’s Chargers, she smiles with delight. After all, she hears that their leader is like them, but Shokrakar shakes her head and says sharply, “No, he’s one of them. Ben-Hassrath.” Shokrakar spits the title out between her teeth as if it is dirty.
“Ben-Hassrath?” Adaar repeats. She squints her eyes as she tries to parse the language. She’s grown up speaking Qunlat since the day she was born, but she doesn’t know the context of this one. “Heart of the People?”
“Parshaara, your amma didn’t raise you to be a fool, Adaar,” Shokrakar testily says. “The Ben-Hassrath are the Ariqun’s way of keeping people under their thumb. Translates to ‘the Heart of the Many’ but ha! More like the Sneaky Bastards of the Many.” Shokrakar tugs Adaar closer by her breastplate and hisses, “Ebasit Ben-Hassrath maraas-toh, tal-eb iss mer-toh ari-van, understood? They will make you disappear if you don’t shut up around them. Tell them nothing that can be used against you. They will re-educate you, sew your lips shut, send you to the arvaarad, force you to fit their own sense of balance rather than your own.”
Her gaze is flinty and hard as cold silverite, but it thaws slowly. Shokrakar lets go of Adaar’s breastplate and says, “I’ll let your amma know that someone from the Ben-Hassrath is coming. Maybe get some of that thicker vitaar that Kaariss fucked up making and cover up her scars. Just don’t let Kaariss start reciting his damn poetry.”
Shokrakar shambles off to find Adaar’s mother, and Adaar is left to wonder what exactly someone from the Ben-Hassrath will be like. She’s seen arvaarad before, and that alone was enough to make her shudder. She is Vashoth and has never seen the likes of the Qun that the large majority of the Valo-Kas has lived under. Adaar knows a kind of Qun that is kind, that is gentle, that is guiding. Asit tal-eb; it is to be. She only needs to know her own nature to know her rightful place, and that is for her and her alone to find. But from what she hears from stories told by the campfire or under dim-lit nights, the kind of Qun that lives in Par Vollen is different. Theirs is a Qun made by the hands of other people, not of their own.
Fragments of Par Vollen still live in her family and the rest of the Valo-Kas though. When Adaar was younger, her mother was the first to paint on her vitaar. Her mother's hands shook as she brushed the vitaar on, and Adaar remembers looking up at her mother with wide eyes. Her mother, with twilight skin and star-like eyes and vertical scars criss-crossing her full lips, looked back at her with all the trembling love she had to offer.
Instead of asking, “amma, amma, why are you shaking,” Adaar remembers shutting her eyes, bowing her head, and allowing her mother to continue painting on the vitaar in a precious kind of silence. The lines of her vitaar remained bold, straight, and true despite her mother’s shaking hands.
Later, Adaar asks her mother about it. Her mother simply leans down to brush her rough-scarred lips across Adaar’s painted brow and whispers, “Because I loved you, imekari, because I was able to keep you, because we both lived long enough for me to be the one to paint your first vitaar.”
Adaar doesn’t learn to appreciate this kind of love until much, much later when she meets the first arvaarad out to hunt a saarebas. The kind of pure, aching, raw love that a mother has for her child is terrifying enough, but when she sees the stitches lining a saarebas’s mouth and the cruel leash the arvaarad holds in their hand, Adaar finally understands the true depth of her mother’s sacrifice and her mother’s love.
The stitches, the leashes, the scars and the hurt, the arvaarad and the Ben-Hassrath. These are things that do not fit in the kind of Qun that Adaar lives and breathes every day. But then again, Adaar has never lived in the same kind of Qun that her mother or father or nearly anyone else in the Valo-Kas have. Her mother is the one to make her say amma instead of tama because tama is a word that gives her mother nightmares. Her father passes his name onto her — adaar, for weapon — but tells her that his name-gift is infinitely more precious to all of them. Shokrakar teaches her words from the Qun — meraad astaarit, meraad itwasit — but makes her promise to find her own balance in the world rather than having someone else make it for her.
So, Adaar has no idea what to expect from the Bull’s Chargers, but the rest of the Valo-Kas do. Oh, there are a few others like her — sweet Kaariss with his poetry, happy Meraad, clever Hissra with their quick fingers — who have grown up outside Par Vollen, but others like Shokrakar, Amma, Baba, Taarlok, and Ashaad are brittle with their wariness.
Adaar calls Kaariss over who’s all too happy to test out his failed batch of vitaar before wandering over to help some Inquisition scouts carry over some crates to the tents. It’s not a difficult task, but as she bends over and hauls one particularly heavy crate up, she loses his balance and careens towards the left. A large hand steadies her by her shoulder, and Adaar sees grey in her peripheral vision. “Te-kost, Ashaad,” Adaar laughs. “Itwasit tal-eb ir-vah maraas venas-ost. I would’ve fallen if it weren’t for you.” She’s about to tell a joke about her slipping on the grass like Meraad did the day before, but the words die on her tongue when she realizes it’s not Ashaad.
“Sorry, I’m not Ashaad,” the new Qunari laughs. He’s huge, towering over Adaar despite her own tall height, and the Qunari’s singular eye looks bright and keen as he sizes Adaar up. He lets his hand fall from Adaar’s shoulder and says, “Your accent isn’t half-bad, you know. Actually more on the nose than what I’ve heard from others like you.”
“What?” Adaar warily says. She gives him a onceover in return. The Qunari’s tall, she’ll give him that. Even for a Qunari, he pushes it, and his horns are absolutely massive and add height to his frame. He wears an eyepatch, but there’s an extensive scar stretching out past the black leather. His clothes are Qunari and he’s got vitaar on with a simple meaning: eyes open. It feels ironic, given his clear lack of an eye. She studies him more carefully now. Adaar could probably take him down if and only if she had the element of surprise. Her magic presses against her skin, longing to get out, but she tamps it down and silences it. No need to lose her edge right here, right now, because of nerves.
“Ah, I should introduce myself, huh? I’m the Iron Bull,” the Qunari says. He jerks his thumb over behind him where a group of other mercenaries are gathering on the far side of camp. Adaar squints and sees a few Dalish elves with tattoos on their faces. He can’t help but wonder if one of them is the Inquisitor, but her attention is sharply brought back to the Iron Bull when he continues, “With the Bull’s Chargers.”
“Ah. You’re… Him,” Adaar says. “Thanks again, I suppose.” She can’t keep the flat tone out of her voice, but she tries.
Iron Bull’s head cocks to the side and he muses, “You’re with the Valo-Kas, yeah? Not from Par Vollen though, are you?”
“You’re quite curious, aren’t you, ser Iron Bull? Why so many questions?” Adaar tartly replies back. She pulls back her shoulders and holds her chin high with each word she says.
The Iron Bull only chuckles, which only makes Adaar bristle more. “Can’t help it; I’m a people person. Besides, I work for the Inquisition. Can’t help but be a little inquisitive to work here.” he quips. He spreads his hands out wide, as if there was nothing to hide, but Adaar can only think of Shokrakar’s words and the scars on her mother’s lips when she looks at him. The Iron Bull’s trying to look so innocent, but it just rubs right against Adaar’s nerves. Adaar thinks she understands the wariness that sets the rest of her found family alight.
Instead of doing anything rash, Adaar says carefully, “I see. Well then, good day, ser Iron Bull. Perhaps I’ll see you later.”
She says that last sentence rather pointedly and turns to leave, but just before she goes, she hears the Iron Bull say, “Oh, we’ll be seeing a lot of each other. Boss wants to buckle down here a little more before heading over to the next area. I’ll see you later, Adaar.”
Adaar shakes her head and continues on her way. It seems like the Iron Bull does as well because he can hear the sound of the Iron Bull’s heavy footsteps leaving behind her. But then, Adaar quietly realizes two things with sudden clarity.
One. She didn’t hear the Iron Bull coming.
Two. She never told the Iron Bull her name.
The Inquisitor recruits yet another band of mercenaries.
It has Rocky complaining all night in the tavern about how the Inquisitor should be satisfied with the Chargers and how this puts them in direct competition with other mercenaries, but the Iron Bull finds himself intrigued by the whole matter because the Inquisitor hires a mercenary band comprised of only Tal-Vashoth.
It’s not rare for wandering Tal-Vashoth to sell out their skills, and if they were far enough from the Qun to become Tal-Vashoth in the first place, those skills were usually military in nature. However, most Tal-Vashoth were solitary, moving in groups of one or two at a time, and usually joined pre-existing mercenary groups on the mainland. From what Rocky groans and gripes about, it seems like this group is headed by a Tal-Vashoth named Shokrakar and staffed entirely of Tal-Vashoth, from the oldest to the very youngest. Now, that was a rarity.
He ends up sauntering down to Skyhold’s courtyard to see what he can overhear, and there’s more than enough to listen to. They’re still trying to recover from the damage at Haven, and any visitor to the mountain peak is scrutinized heavily to determine if they are to be friend or foe. A few of the scullery maids are already whispering about them, wondering if they’re going to protect Skyhold from what happened in Haven and whether or not a group of Tal-Vashoth would be more reliable than a group of templars. Iron Bull almost laughs out loud at that. Anyone who was at Seheron and lived to see another day would take the templars over the Tal-Vashoth. At least templars were predictable, always bound to their oaths and their duties, always praying to the prophet their own people killed. But Tal-Vashoth were unreliable. How could you predict what a traitor would do other than to constantly turn their backs on what they knew? And to turn away from the Qun of all things after all it had done for Par Vollen… Those that chose the path of the Tal-Vashoth were to be feared and avoided.
They’re a motley crew as far as Bull can tell. There’s a few of them that seem born and bred under the Qun; the way they move and speak betrays their origin. But the rest of them, despite bearing the horns of the Qunari, read more like outsiders. Their tongues are tainted with the accent of the common tongue, bearing closer resemblance to that of the humans and dwarves littering the Free Marches, and their limbs are loose with the lack of the Qun’s discipline.
One of them almost lurches right into Iron Bull and he reaches out to steady her. She laughs, Qunlat rolling off her tongue as if she were born speaking it, and it throws him off-guard. Her accent is still noticeably foreign, but she speaks the syllables with the proper enunciation and twist of the tongue. There’s no mistaking it; she was born speaking it despite being born outside of the Qun. It makes the whole mercenary gang look even more interesting to the Iron Bull’s eyes, and it makes him re-evaluate the original question: how long could a Tal-Vashoth go before snapping under the absence of the Qun?
He studies her features, rakes his mind through every possibility. This is likely the one called Adaar. There are two in the mercenary group with the name, and given what the Tal-Vashoth call adaar versus what he would call an adaar , he estimates the two people bearing greatswords to be the ones. Funny enough, the second Adaar only appeared in the Ben-Hassrath’s records fairly recently, and this Adaar looks too old to be born with that name. However, her entire bearing is so different to that raised under the Qun that he can’t imagine any other circumstance other than her being given a new name. It perplexes him, but that’s something he can always work out later.
For now, he settles on being delightfully pervasive with his charm. He knows he throws Adaar off guard and he intends to utilize it as much as he can. So, he leans in, lets her name drip off his tongue like honeyed poison, and saunters off, knowing that he’s set her on edge. She’ll probably scamper off and rat him out to her leader, sending the message that he wants to give.
The Ben-Hassrath, and by extent, the Qun, are always watching. And the Iron Bull is nothing more than an instrument of their will.
He does not intend to disappoint them.