Hilda was calm, cool, collected. Where many of the rest of her companions had never been within line of sight of a live darkspawn, she had been fighting them since she was old enough to handle the draw of a longbow; her family had been fighting them since their first appearance, and the blood of heroes ran thick in her veins. That she was a pool of golden-haired calm amidst the chaos of a possible attack spoke well to her steady demeanor. Talfryn spoke, and her head bobbed as she took the orders to heart and moved to implement them -
- at least, until the Culture Hound flopped down at her feet and showed his belly, which even in the midst of battle could not fail to make her smile. She relaxed the draw on the witchbow, arrow braced against the carved bone, and crouched on the balls of her feet long enough to ruffle the fur of the canine's belly with one hand. "Hyu most be qviet, leetle vun," she gently chided the dog, little more than a puppy before the towering Anderfelns woman. Even the runts of her family's wolf-dogs would have dwarfed the Culture Hound. "Is ferry dangeroos. Keep hyu master safe, ja?"
And then she was standing and striding, her additional height on Talfryn affording the archer a slightly better view of the upcoming areas. The shore glittered in the night, and it would have been lovely and picturesque if not for the sight that awaited them; Hilda's skaldic mind recorded the events with Vienne, and though she did not have the luxury of composing prose on the spot to commemorate the first Warden casualty in the war against the Blight, she did have a moment to wonder if Vienne Reyer would live in song and infamy as a traitor to her people. That looked an awful lot like parley with the darkspawn, and that was a disturbing thing - as much so as the fact that they had seemed to talk back to her.
The scene exploded into movement, and Talfryn bellowed, and all extraneous thoughts fell away as the mantle of an archer and warrior draped across her shoulders, erasing words, leaving only images, the track of the hurlock in the night, Talfryn moving, Vienne falling. The Hurlock attempted to flee, and Talfryn left his back open for Hilda to protect. The skald addressed both in one smooth movement, loosing arrows after the fleeing beast, broadheads for that muscled back and barbed hunting arrows for its legs. Strange, that the beast should flee, but the bone-bow sang and hummed, and Hilda did not intend to allow it to escape.