<span style="color: #00FF00">Valehna flushed for a moment when Tal prodded her to say what she meant. For some reason, the thought that occurred to her embarrassed her.<br/><br/>"I don't know... just a stupid thought. I just wondered for a second if their relationship started to teeter on that edge between hate and love," she said a little too casually. She pretended to be engrossed with the beard on one of the dwarven statues. "But it's not at all likely."</span><br/><br/>Mesaraih frowned when Ester told him how she had been arrested. "And you used blood magic to do it," he said, putting the pieces of her story together. He met her gaze then and smiled. "Guards in Denerim are pricks, especially to folks in the Alienage. I've seen how they operate. They toy with people, take bribes... corrupt to the core, really." He was impressed at how light and conversational he was able to keep his tone. He might have been talking about the weather.<br/><br/>He grabbed the dagger she used to cut her hand and cut a piece of cloth off from his shirt. He poured water that he had put into an empty flask from the lake to clean it, then wrung it out to dislodge the water. He was focused intensely as he did all this, not looking at Ester. Just before he finished, he spoke again. "I admit, I felt a little unclean having you use blood magic to heal me. But my mind's been working quick, and I've come to a couple of conclusions. First and foremost is that I kill for a living and it's nowhere near my place to judge. And second is that I don't know a lot about blood magic apart from what I hear people say. Obviously one always hears bad things, so my opinion of it isn't too high. But it helped me just now, and I have enough perspective that the things you hear people say don't tell the whole story about anything."<br/><br/>He looked back at Ester, reaching out towards her injured hand while holding the makeshift bandage in the other. "Do you mind?" he asked.