Since they'd left Gwaren, Ser Zekry had been tasked with keeping the tail end of the caravan safe. In general, this was a rather important job. He could see both sides of the caravan where he was, enabling him to warn and attack quickly if someone tried to outflank them, but that meant nothing to him right now. The order to trail the caravan had come from Talfryn, and that meant his time and talent was being wasted. He resented the South Reach native, thinking him to be spoiled by the Teyrna and unfairly favored, while he himself had been in the Teyrn's service years longer, and was the senior soldier. Because of this animosity, he didn't care much about watching the caravan, or the dwarves in the wagons, or their mercenary escorts. There were other, less useful knights to do that - Talfryn clearly needed a reality check.
When the discussion came up on what way they were going to go to get to their destination, Zekry, from the very beginning, was against going through the forest. He would have rather gone back to Gwaren and gotten on a boat that to ride through that forest. It was no secret that the knight held a deep hate for the elves - both the tribes in the Brecilian and those in the Alienage - and he wasn't afraid to be upfront about it. He had admittedly been part of many of the skirmishes between the people of Gwaren and the Dalish clans, and probably deserved to lose his title because of that. While he swore up and down that the Dalish started the whole thing, Rois reprimanded him for it - being a senior knight meant he was setting an example for the others, and this was a very bad example - and punished him by sending him on this fantastic trip with her son and the Grey Warden.
When the caravan stopped, he grumbled and rode his way up to the front of the line, leering at their newest party members as he passed by. Stopping when he reached the Warden-Commander and the Knight-Captain, the claymore already drawn and ready, the look on his face was telling, but he spoke up anyway. "Why have we stopped?" He was sure there were scouts just waiting for them. Then he heard the clashing of metal ahead of them. "We shouldn't be sitting here idle like targets."