The smell of cooking meat wafted across her nose, and Hilda's usual sweet smile broadened yet further, Ashya's comment prompting a light laugh. "Ho, a leetle vile yet, ja?" she grinned to the mage, straightening the papers on her lap, smoothing her traveling leathers to provide a surface to write upon. "Hyu seff me vun of der pastries. Eef I speel jam all offer der paper, I vill haff to write new vun, und mein letters ken get ferry long." She listened to the light chatter as she began to write, smiling still, thinking on her family; she wondered if Alaric's wife's baby had been born healthy, and if it was a boy or girl, and if the new parents had yet had time to write to her while she had been travelling. The child must have been nearly a year old by now, having never met its middle aunt, the skald on the road long before Greta's tummy-bump had been little more than the thickness of Hilda's fist. If Alaric hadn't found the time to write her, Hilda would have understood, although she kept hoping each day that she was at Amaranthine that a courier from the north would catch up with her supplies caravan. Perhaps the letters were yet enroute, sent first to Weisshaupt, then as cargo with whatever group was journeying to Ferelden -
"Ho!" she said quietly to herself, stiffening her back and pausing in mid-sentence on the first page to pluck up a clean piece of parchment, writing across the top in flowing, practiced script, Raelias Lóravarnion, almost as a reminder. "Een all der rosh, I haff forgotten Raelias! He most tink I am eegnoring heem. Ah, I hope he ees no cross mit me...."