There And Back Again Ch 192

A/N:

I'm sorry for the delay. I promise the trolls had nothing to do with it - just travel, compounded by the flu, compounded by holiday craziness! This will be the last chapter of 2019; I should be back the first Monday in January. So Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas/Hanukkah/Eid/Kwanzaa...and any other holiday I may have missed. See you all in 2020!

*****

Chapter One Hundred Ninety-Two: Haunted House

We chatted with the Hawkes and Karl Thekla about inconsequential matters for a while longer, until we were interrupted by Levi, who brought a stack of paperwork for my approval. I sighed. "Well, you're all welcome to stay here as long as you like. Karl, later I'll introduce you to Larus, our other resident non-Warden mage. You can all feel free to explore the Keep, and drop in to talk any time. I'd love to hear what you decide, when you figure it out."

Alistair stood. "Warden, you're with me." My husband kissed me briefly before leading Bethany out; Leandra, Carver, and Karl followed them, leaving me to the dreaded paperwork.

Over the next few days, I saw the Hawkes settle in at the Keep; Bethany and Sigrun seemed to become fast friends, and the other Wardens accepted the pretty mage without question. Karl alternated his time between the tower with Jowan and Larus, and the training grounds with Donal and Bethany, seeming to enjoy teaching others and learning new skills. And Carver shadowed his mother as though she might be abducted the moment he looked away – largely sulking, as far as I could tell. He was the one I couldn't predict, and I got the impression Leandra's plans would hinge on his. She'd lost her first child to the demands of Kirkwall, and another to the Wardens – but Carver was a wild card.

He was also the person I tried to avoid the most. I felt guilty, but I couldn't help it; the whining was too frustrating, and I worried I'd snap and say something I'd regret. I resolved to put him out of my mind and let him sort out his own problems.

It was probably another week later when the rumours started.

At first everyone assumed it was nothing – rats, maybe, though I had never thought rats would survive in our climate, and no one had ever seen one at the Peak; or perhaps just some guards with overly active imaginations who'd fallen asleep on duty – but it wasn't long before it wasn't only guards. The cook came to me with complaints that someone had taken the roast she'd planned to make for supper, or a basket of sausages would go missing before it ever made it to the table. One of the chamber maids started complaining about hearing 'scratching' sounds from inside the walls when she was washing floors. Blankets and cloaks went missing from the laundry, and no one could find them anywhere. One of the children who wasn't usually overly dramatic claimed to have seen a 'monster', though he could never say what it was or where he'd seen it. And every so often, someone would report seeing a shadow around the corner in a hallway, only to find nothing when they went to investigate.

Given the Peak's reputation for being haunted – something that had been literally true, until we'd managed to banish the demons that had taken the place over – my first concern was that the veil had thinned, or that someone had summoned...something. I spent hours walking the halls, along with some of the templars on loan from the Circle, as well as Alistair, Jowan, Larus, Karl, and Donal, trying to sense anything amiss magically, but we came up empty. Jowan and Larus assured me that the veil was no thinner than usual, and several rituals they attempted to strengthen the veil made no difference to the rumours.

Alistair and the Wardens checked and double-checked the doors to the Deep Roads; there was no sign of any darkspawn activity, and the doors were watched twenty-four hours per day, with two more guards down the hall in front of the eluvian door. No one had seen anything. It seemed unlikely darkspawn could have been the cause with so many Wardens wandering around – not to mention, they'd never been all that subtle. The eluvian was quiescent, at least as far as we knew, and the door hadn't been opened since my meeting with Flemeth.

Our security was much stricter since the Crows had attacked Zevran months earlier, but I had Avanna and Mhairi re-examine their protocols and scour the Keep looking for spies or assassins, with no success. We'd spent dozens of man-hours on the stupid rumours, and yet nothing was found. If there had only been one or two reports, I could have put it off to coincidence, but too many people had seen, or heard, something unusual. It was making everyone antsy – suddenly Alistair and I had double guard complements everywhere we went, and the guards on duty were as jumpy as rabbits.

It had been several days of this when we finally got our first clue – and it was pretty much diagnostic. Levi opened up a new wing of the Keep for renovations, as our recruiting had been successful enough that we would need more rooms once the army returned from Kirkwall, and the construction crews that went in to start pulling out old, broken furniture and other debris reported something no one had expected.

"Dog leavings?" I raised my eyebrow at the red-faced man my seneschal had brought to me. "What..." I turned to Levi helplessly. "What are dog leavings?"

Levi covered his mouth with one hand, clearly trying not to laugh – and failing. "I believe he means their...fluids, Lady Sierra. Waste."

The light went on. "Dog poop?" I sat back in relief. "Well that's hardly a surprise – we were here for a while with Prince before we had any way of disposing of the...leavings."

The young man flushed even more scarlet, but shook his head confidently. "No, my Lady. These are fresh." He winced. "And rather more unpleasant than average." When I looked puzzled, he went on, "I believe we have a sick dog somewhere in the Keep."

I stood up and paced by my hearth. "How would a sick animal go unseen? It's a big Keep, yes, but we have a lot of personnel, and we've searched the place top to bottom." I could hear Alistair talking to someone in his office next door, and as I considered, I distractedly strained to hear it over the crackling of the fire. Alistair stopped talking, and I heard Faren laugh.

I stopped pacing and stared at the fireplace, a new thought occurring to me. "Levi – are all the hearths linked?"

"Pardon?"

I gestured at the fire. "Are the hearths linked? Like, how does the smoke get out? There's two floors above this one – do all the hearths lead up to a central chimney?" I couldn't believe it had never occurred to me before. "Is there a way to get from one hearth to another?"

He tilted his head as he looked where I was looking. "They do share a chimney, of course – most of the hearths are built on the same walls, with a hollow space behind to allow the smoke to escape – but there are dividers between the rooms. You can't see into the Commander's office, for example."

"But I can hear into it. Which means they must be connected – what if the dividers in some of the unused rooms have fallen? When we searched, an animal could slip between rooms through the hearth – or maybe even hide in the walls."

Levi looked back at the worker, who shrugged. "We can check, my Lady."

"Where would an animal even come from? How would it get here?"

I frowned thoughtfully. "I have an idea about that, too."

*****

I recruited Levi and Alistair to help me; we spent a few hours cleaning up one of the rooms near where the doggy doo was found, bringing in a bed frame and a small table once it was clean. We packed a large meal of purposefully fragrant items into a basket, and Alistair and I proceeded to have an intimate dinner for two, our guards left outside the door but aware of what we were doing. The remains of the meal we left loosely packed in the open basket next to the table, and Alistair and I climbed into the bed as though to go to sleep fully dressed.

And then we waited. It was difficult not to drift off, cradled as I was in Alistair's warm arms, but we jostled each other awake any time either of us began to snore. It was dim in the little room, but we'd set up one of the arcane lamps in the tiny bathroom so it wasn't pitch black. We must have been lying there for a couple of hours when I first heard the scratching, and I felt Alistair tense beside me. I waited, perfectly still, staring at the fireplace where the sound was coming from. It took a few minutes, but eventually a sleek, familiar, dark head poked out of the unlit hearth, ears perked and nose twitching.

I waited until the body followed, creeping across the floor quietly, before I sat up and leaped forward to slip my hand into the leather collar I knew I'd find there. The dog, startled, lunged back towards the fireplace, but I held on, even though I was yanked forward, crashing to the floor on my knees.

"Prince!" I yelped as he dragged me across the floor. "Prince, stop!"

The powerful body stopped pulling and turned, and a long tongue darted out to swipe across my face as he whined. I struggled to sit up while Alistair thumbed on the arcane lamp we'd left by the bed. The familiar brown fur came into focus, broad nose and stumpy tail and dark, puppy-dog eyes just the same as I remembered.

"Prince! It is you! What are you doing here?" He butted me with his head, and I laughed as I nearly fell again. "Bad dog! You were supposed to wait for Aedan in Highever."

He whined and stuck his head down into my lap.

"But why have you been hiding and stealing food?" I looked at him critically, and noticed he looked a bit leaner than the last time I'd seen him. "And someone thought you'd been sick. Why didn't you just come find us?"

I'd released his collar, and he climbed out of my lap and licked me one more time before crossing the room to the basket of food. I barely had a chance to react when the little monster leaned in, grabbed a package of something – pheasant, I thought – and then trotted over to the door, reaching up with one big paw to scratch at the wood. The door swung open – it was old, and the latch had decayed – and he vanished outside before I could stop him.

I clambered to my feet just as Alistair got off the bed with the lamp in hand, and we both followed Prince into the hall. Our guards waited there, clearly shocked by the appearance of a mabari we'd all thought had been left in Highever. I saw Prince disappear into a room a couple of doors down – though he could have moved faster, so I didn't think he was trying very hard to hide at this point – and I followed him inside curiously, Alistair and Avanna on my heels.

What I found there stopped me in my tracks, and Alistair bumped into me from behind. Prince had managed to unwrap the meat he'd stolen, and then curled up around another dog – a large, tawny-coloured, nearly skeletal animal that was lying listlessly on a pile of blankets. The missing linens! The strange dog barely even noticed us standing there as she wolfed down the food Prince had placed before her. And I could say 'she' with confidence, because despite the visible ribs and the spine that stuck out from sagging skin, the other noticeable physical characteristic was a huge, distended, grossly pregnant belly.

"She's not a mabari," Alistair murmured behind me, and I looked at her again to see he was right – she was nowhere near as broad through the shoulders as the other mabari I'd seen, and her skull was narrower too. She had a long, bushy tail, entirely different from Prince's little stump. She had the same shaped muzzle, though, and her ears were nearly identical to Prince's. "Or not a purebred mabari, anyway."

Suddenly the pieces fit into place. Prince had found himself a girlfriend – a dog someone had clearly abandoned, likely because of her lineage. And he'd been skulking around the Keep ever since trying to provide for her.

"Oh, Prince." I went to my knees in front of the two dogs, far enough that the little female wouldn't feel threatened. She watched me warily as she finished off the pheasant, but then dropped her head down onto Prince's flank, clearly exhausted. "Your puppies, you scamp?"

He whined and licked the ear of his companion, showing me clearly that it didn't matter whether the puppies were his – they were going to be ours, regardless.

"Alistair, can you bring the rest of that basket in here?"

He didn't leave, but I heard Avanna's footsteps, and within a couple of moments the basket of food we'd used as bait for Prince was at my feet. I reached in and took out a wedge of cheese, holding it out in front of me and creeping forward slowly. The female growled at me briefly, but Prince licked her face, and she stopped with the most hilarious look of outrage I'd ever seen a dog give. "Relax, lady, it's just cheese." I put the cheese down right in front of her, and when I backed up a bit she sniffed it and then took a dainty bite; before she even had the chance to swallow it, she'd grabbed the rest of the hunk and made it disappear. I giggled and held my hand out cautiously, ready to pull away if she nipped at me. She sniffed me and then allowed me to pat her gently under the chin before pulling away with a huff.

I shuffled back and then stood, letting Alistair put an arm around my waist. "Well, she can't stay here," I declared, looking around at the dusty room full of debris and broken furniture and the dark hearth. "We need to move her to somewhere warmer. And cleaner. I wonder if she can walk to our rooms?"

In the end it was clear she couldn't; we carried her on a stretcher, wrapped in blankets and pacified with yet more cheese. "Don't you bite me, lady," I warned her as we lifted her carefully. When we had her settled on a nest of blankets near our hearth, Donal came and took a look at her; he was gruff as usual, but his eyes softened when he looked at the pathetic creature we'd found.

"I don't do dogs, you know," he complained. "But best I can tell she's just really malnourished. And filthy."

I nodded, relieved. "We can fix that. How long do we have until those puppies arrive?"

"How would I know, lass?" It was nice that the mage wasn't anxious around me, though I reflected with amusement that a little intimidation might have made him a bit more helpful. "Can't be long – they're getting pretty big."

"Just how many puppies are we talking about, here?" I was a little worried; most of what I knew about dogs having babies came from fictional stories like "101 Dalmations", but if we had fifteen puppies to look after, we were in trouble.

"Six."

Somewhat relieved, I resolved to write to the kennel master in Highever and ask for some advice about taking care of mabari – or mostly mabari – puppies. I had no idea what the birth process would entail – would she need help? – or what to feed puppies when they became less reliant on their mothers for nutrition. Actually, the number of questions I had was enormous, but I put it aside until I could do something useful about it.

It took a few days of feeding her to get the dog to trust us enough to touch her regularly, and a few days more for her to be strong enough to have a bath. We put her in our tub and carefully washed her with my little showerhead; the poor thing shivered in fear the whole time, but Prince even got in the tub with her – voluntarily! – to keep her calm.

He was less impressed when I took advantage of the situation to wash him too.

Finally, we had a clean, beautiful dog sitting near the hearth, her coat practically glowing in the firelight; she was still weak, but every day was a little better. We ended up litter training her – Prince already knew how, and I wondered how much he was able to teach her, because I was pretty sure the average dog wasn't that clever.

"What are we going to name her?" Alistair finally asked.

"I love how you didn't even ask me if we were keeping her." I kissed his chin.

"Well, even if you didn't want to, I'm pretty sure Prince wouldn't have it any other way." He was right; just thinking about Prince bringing this dog here, up through the snow and the cold, and hiding her away from us for so long, made me a little weepy.

"Well, you can't just keep calling her 'lady'," Alistair asserted.

I looked at him in surprise. "Can't I?" I smiled broadly. "Actually, I think that's perfect. Lady and the Scamp." I poked Prince with my toe, and he growled playfully. "The Prince and his Lady."

Alistair looked down at the massively pregnant animal at our feet. "What do you think about that? Lady?" She didn't respond, but Prince's happy bark sealed it. "Welcome to the family, I suppose."

And that's how I ended up with a dog. Lady wasn't a full-blooded mabari, but she obviously shared a number of their traits – she was smarter than any normal dog, easier to train than I had any right to expect, and rather territorial about her living space; we ended up setting her up in her own room within our suite, because she developed the habit of growling at anyone – except me – who entered our sitting room. She seemed content to nest in her pile of linens next to the hearth, and ate enough to keep putting on weight until she no longer looked like an under-stuffed toy.

I had sent my letter to Highever right away, and it wasn't long before I got a response – in the form of a teenaged boy, the son of Fergus' kennel master. He showed up at the Keep with a letter of introduction from Fergus' seneschal; some of our servants who'd come from Highever recognised him as well, so it wasn't hard to trust him. And the sunny smile that was never far from his face didn't hurt. His name was Jaro, and he was the most laid-back person I'd met – in Thedas or on Earth.

It turned out Jaro was not just the kennel master's son, but also his apprentice, and his gentle way with Lady helped reassure me that he knew what he was about. It took him no time to worm his way into her trust, and soon there were two of us who could get close to her. He examined her carefully and made some suggestions for her diet, but seemed pleased with her progress when I told him what she'd been like when we had found her.

He told us that given the stage of her pregnancy, the puppies were likely Prince's; apparently mabari pregnancies were longer than other dog breeds, and the pups born much more mature. Given Lady was only part-mabari, if the father had been another breed the puppies would have been born weeks earlier. This meant that the puppies wouldn't be blind and deaf the way most dogs were for the first few weeks of life – and that it would take less time for them to be independent of their mother.

Jaro promised to stay until the puppies were born; he'd helped his father during many births, and was definitely the closest to an expert we were likely to find. The fact that he was so easy to be around made him a delightful guest, and I thought that if he and Alistair were closer in age, the two of them would be fast friends. As it was, the signs of stress on my husband's face eased when he spent time with the teen, and I ended up doubly grateful that Jaro had come.

With things settling down, Alistair began the odious process of sending the Wardens out to the various outposts we had discussed over the months since moving in to Soldier's Keep. Loghain and Alim were sent to Ostagar, along with Justice; Loghain had the aura of authority required, and we figured sending two elves – or, in the case of Justice, a spirit in the body of an elf – would help the Wardens be less intimidating to the local Dalish population who'd taken over the old ruins once it had been cleaned up. I'd done all I could for Justice; our conversations were always frustrating, but I could honestly say I'd tried my best to make him see the grey in the world, instead of just the black and white he'd always known. I had to admit that I would feel more comfortable with him further away, though – and that went for Loghain and his pushy inquisitiveness, too. They were going to stop at the Circle on the way, bringing a report to Greagoir on the templars at the Peak, as well as a plea from Alistair for more recruits – and my request to have him consider accepting Karl back to Kinloch.