Chapter Text
He found her in a glade nearly a mile away from camp.
Bull had seen her eye the view when they had passed here two hours ago – a quick glance towards the horizon before her gaze drew back down to the withers of her hart, shoulders bowed – and he’d backtracked through the woods until he found it again, playing on a hunch. And here she was.
Aisling prayed by a candle when she had no hearth – she eschewed the cheerful camaraderie of a campfire these days, flitting away into the darkness between one blink of the eye and the next – whispering furtively to her favored goddess where she once might have regaled her companions with a hymn. She used to sing to Bull often, when he showed up at her quarters late in the night after a few too many spirits; she would play her lute and sing her pretty elven verses to him until his head stopped spinning, and laugh like a ringing bell when he dragged her down to kiss.
Now, she couldn’t play the lute anymore, and he hadn’t heard her sing in weeks.
He knew the exact moment Aisling realized he was there: she startled badly, nearly dropping her candle in the grass with her fumbling single hand. Bull swallowed, ruthlessly stemming the urge to rush to her side and risk further flaring her anxiety.
It had been subtle, at first, and she had hidden it well. The slightest hunches of her shoulders when he came near, the barest flinch when he touched her. He had slept beside her in their shared tent for near a week before he’d realized she was not there for half the night, and wide awake for the rest of it. She had given up the pretense by now and disappeared for the long hours between dusk and dawn, the black circles under her eyes seemingly deepening and darkening by the hour.
Bull had never seen her so worn. A thousand miles of hard travel and an army of demons had not dimmed the light in her eyes, and now she could barely look at him.
Bull ran his thumb over the dragon’s tooth around his neck. Aisling had woven the cord it dangled from herself: intricate gold-black patterns in the style of her Hearthkeeper vallaslin, exquisite in detail; a joining of his customs with hers. She had confessed to him once, pink-cheeked and sated in his arms, that it had taken her weeks to finish, nerves and butterflies kindling clumsiness where a master’s skill once guided her fingers with ease.
Bull refused to believe someone who had proven her devotion so utterly could tire of him so abruptly. He could only hope she would allow him the opportunity to prove his.
“You have to sleep, Kadan,” Bull said quietly. “I don’t mind if it’s not on the same bedroll as me, but you can’t keep going like this.”
Aisling was quiet, clutching her candle to her chest.
“We can shuffle some things around, get you your own tent. Or you can bunk with Skinner and Dalish—”
Aisling stiffened, jerking her head in a negative.
Bull breathed out slowly. “All right. Alone, then. That’s all right, Kadan.”
It wasn’t, really. Bull wanted to curl around her and never let go. But the nights were getting colder, and he didn’t want her wandering the darkness alone, not now she couldn’t draw a bowstring anymore. This compromise would do.
For now.
*****
Krem was still awake when Bull finally made it back to camp, reading by a lantern while Grim snored on the other side of the tent. Krem inclined his head in greeting before turning back to his book, allowing Bull a moment to compose himself. Bull breathed out slowly, running a hand over his face, and lay down on the spare cot, staring up unseeingly at the roof of the tent.
“Night terrors,” he murmured finally. “No fucking doubt about it. She doesn’t want to sleep with anyone there, not just me.”
Krem handed him a flask without prompting, some kind of liquor that burned punishingly going down. “You still think shellshock, then?”
Bull shook his head slowly, taking a long drink, and then another, wishing he could hope for answers at the bottom. “She would confide in me. She would come to me for comfort.”
That was the crux of his confusion: any burden she had borne in three years of bonded companionship she had shared with him, seeking his council or his shoulder without fail. Aisling’s trust in him had once been his proudest achievement, that she let him be steward of her body where she was queen of his heart. The intimacy that implied had molten any boundaries between them; he knew the bones of her, the framework of her, and nothing explained her silence now.
“She may think you would judge her a coward,” Krem suggested, voice laced with obvious doubt. Bull was the last to dismiss maladies of the mind; the very thought that Aisling may be suffering thus made his veins freeze with worry, that her nerves had been shot by the trauma of losing a limb.
When he closed his eye he still felt it like it was yesterday: finding Aisling screaming in the grass on the other side of that final eluvian, covered in blood; clutching at her severed arm. He had acted swiftly at the time with the kind of calm only panic could foster – knocking her unconscious to spare her further agony and binding her arm to stem the bleeding – but now her hoarse screams rang in his ears every time he reached beside him in the night and found her gone.
Perhaps she blamed him for failing to protect her. Bull certainly did.
“Chief…” Krem rolled onto his side, reaching out to lay a hand on his shoulder. “She’ll come to you.”
“Yeah,” Bull said roughly, looking away.
****
Another week passed in stony silence. The climate harshened as they drew further north towards the Storm Coast; as the weather soured, so did the last dredges of morale.
Bull took his axe to a couple treelings for firewood while his Chargers set up camp in dreary silence. He possibly applied a bit more strength than was strictly necessary, but his frustration had gone too long untempered for him to muster any restraint now; Darkspawn and demons were sparse since the Inquisition cleaned house along these parts, which left very few things to kill.
He had left Aisling tending to the horses in solitude, the only time she seemed even remotely calm anymore. Cullen was watching her for him; he and Rainier were still with them, though both muttered vaguely about plans of remaining in Ferelden instead of crossing into the Free Marches. Varric, too, would only accompany them up until they reached Kirkwall, though he eyed Aisling doubtfully when he spoke of returning to his post as Viscount.
It was clear they were all of them waiting on cues from their Inquisitor, but Aisling was in no state to provide leadership right now, never mind that she wasn’t anyone’s Inquisitor anymore. Bull would stay with her until his final breath, but even he had to admit the aimless wandering was getting tiresome.
Aisling had begged off returning to Skyhold at all after the Exalted Council, sending Leliana and Josephine in her stead to dismantle the Inquisition’s operations. She didn’t read any of the ravens they sent, leaving that to Bull or Cullen; she seemed wholly uninterested, and refused to even listen to their reports. Bull had stopped trying to engage her on the matter, too wary of upsetting her further, but sometimes Cullen still guided his horse beside hers during their travels, speaking to her in hushed whispers that she carefully ignored.
“Chief?”
Bull looked up to find Stitches approaching him, shoulders drawn tight with tension.
“Can I have a word?”
Bull nodded and let his axe stick in the young oak he’d been destroying. “What is it?”
Stitches took a fortifying breath. “I was going through my stores to make a poultice, to help with Grim’s sprained ankle. And I… noticed some embrium missing. I thought nothing of it until I checked my logs to make sure, and…” Stitches rubbed the back of his neck, looking away. “Well, someone’s stealing. It’s subtle, Chief, and some the deficit is replaced the next day, but… I checked my entire collection to make sure, and the embrium was not the only thing tampered with. Dawn lotus, prophet’s laurel, felanderis root…”
Stitches trailed off, grimacing. Bull was no expert of herbology like Stitches or Aisling, but foreboding simmered uneasily in his gut with recognition: these were rare, potent herbs that would garner you a hefty sum at any black market.
“It’s… these herbs are… well, they are healing herbs, yes, but I discovered they were not all that were taken—” Stitches stopped abruptly, biting his lip.
Bull waited with the closest approximation to patience he could muster; fists clenched by his side, unable to stem a glare. “Well?”
Stitches looked up at him, face pale but professionally blank. “In high doses, combined with the missing blood lotus and death root, they are used by some Dalish clans to terminate pregnancy.”
For a long, blissful moment, Bull’s mind was too empty with shock to connect the dots.
Was this the answer, then? Was this the secret plaguing her? He had not lain with Aisling in weeks, not since the first signs of her depression manifested, but the timing of it rhymed just as well as his shellshock theory had.
Bull could see on Stitches’ face that he had reached the same conclusion before coming to speak to him; Aisling had been midwife to her clan before joining the Inquisition, and she and Stitches had been fast friends for years, sharing their medical expertise and bemused stories of stubborn patients. Bull wouldn’t be surprised if Stitches had learned of this treatment from Aisling in the first place.
“Chief,” Stitches said quietly. “There are plenty of reasons why she would choose this path. Or she could be helping someone else—”
Bull held up a hand to stop him, feeling oddly calm. “I know it must have cost you to come to me. You have not broken her trust, brother. She needs help, and you are helping her. Thank you.”
“I doubt Her Worship will see it that way.” Stitches heaved a sigh. “She would not speak to me, at any rate. I thought perhaps you could share her burden.”
“I will,” Bull said quietly.