Alistair manages a smile, at ballista—nostalgic, fond, but mostly still worried and mildly put out. "Next time." Maybe Zevran should never travel anywhere there isn't a ballista—so basically nowhere that hasn't been carefully planned for in advance—ever again.

What Zevran is saying about knees doesn't fully register until there are eyebrows to go with it. Then he laughs and flicks him lightly on the back of his head, barely enough to be felt through the blanket. If Alistair blushes, it's lost to how red his face already is, cold and wind-chapped and recently mottled by crying or the effort not to.

"Because it's the hero's lot to suffer," he says, sing-song, clearing snow off one of the low boulders that's guarding the fire from the wind before he sits down on it. There's room beside him. Or in front of him, where he's blocking the wind now, too, with the broad span of his back. "To overcome. The cold is the real dragon you have to slay."

Nonsense. But not accusatory, angry nonsense, so hopefully it's an improvement.