INQUISITOR TREVELYAN.

   𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝙰𝙿𝙿𝙻𝙴 𝙱𝚁𝙴𝙰𝙺𝚂 𝙸𝙽 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝙼𝙰𝚁𝙴’𝚂 𝚃𝙴𝙴𝚃𝙷,  and Hal must tug the smaller half away in his hand lest she swallow the whole of it. He laughs at her impatient nose, and turns to Abel again.  “Handsome, isn’t she?”

   She is indeed a beautiful animal, bay and roan, dappled white and chestnut through her body to the dark, silvery-black flow of her legs. A high back and lean body, an unwhitened red head and ink-dark mane and tail. Strawberry, they would have called her colouring in Ferelden. Uncommonly beautiful, Halwn thinks, and had upon first seeing her, and uncommonly reserved in her disposition, not unlike the young knight beside him—even with the tension in her body, and the tired way she holds her right front leg bent above the ground, refusing to put weight upon it. The limb is bound in cloth around a wooden splint.

   “She is called Félice. Her foreleg is fractured. The Duke de Val Montaigne rode her too hard up the hill, and then traded her off to the stablehands with a demand that she be dealt with.”  A rare curl of contempt colours Hal’s tone. It feels good to finally express it.  “The mage healers have knit the bone as best they might, and her pain is eased for now, but they are unsure if she will ever bear a rider again. Time will tell. Dennet has been tending her, but as he will be riding east next week for the livestock market in Oswin—”

  He hesitates only barely. Halwn is aware of how it might appear, the collusion of concepts between them, this beautiful horse and this beautiful man, and how Abel might imagine that this is how the Inquisitor sees him now: a wounded animal, callously discarded. He trusts that Abel understands him enough to know that such a thing could never be true.

   “I thought perhaps you might like to care for her.”

   Abel’s eyes sweep towards him, surprised and blue and beautiful in the dawn light, and Halwn cannot help but smile. Abel’s free hand is resting upon the edge of the stall door and the Inquisitor reaches for it, takes it up—possessed by some feeling, brings it to his mouth. Abel, as he always is, is tolerant of the gesture. There is even a kind of indulgent sympathy around his eyes when Halwn touches his brow and thumbs his chin, still smiling.

   The memory of Abel in the kitchen yard brushing his white courser in the morning rises unlooked for in Halwn’s mind. The two of them sturdy and fine, yellow light falling over them. Abel’s murmured words to her, his soft and nurturing tenderness, and how stealing sight of that private interchange had stirred something in Halwn’s heart, a pleasure like the soft ache of a healing bruise. He has not seen that animal, and the Inquisitor knows it likely that she is buried in the Exalted Plains, or somewhere else along the road of war. It pains him to think of it. It pains him to think of Abel unconscious in a healer’s tent, delirious with injury, fed on by the flies of war, unable to say farewell. It pains him because he is sure that it must pain Abel, as well.

   Abel isn’t an animal. He isn’t broken. Still, there is hardly a person in the world who is not in need of some healing—and healing is all the harder when its work is undergone alone.

   Life goes on, Abel, with or without us,  Halwn wants to say, nearly as much as he wants to bend down to kiss Abel’s upturned mouth, but he cannot bring himself to make the moment heavy. Everything is so heavy now. Just an hour or two of lightness is all the cure in the world.