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Arianwen hated Orzammar.
It was all the worst parts of Denerim rolled into one closed society. No way in, no way out. Even their dead were tossed into the deep to become part of the landscape. She’d never been afraid of close spaces before; thrived in them, actually. But down here, even before they’d gone into the Deep Roads, she’d been able to feel the pressure of the whole world above her, watching.
Waiting.
And now—if she was lucky—she was to be at her most vulnerable in it.
“Tabris, you’re going to need to focus a little longer,” Wynne said, her eyes on Wen’s leg where it hung over Alistair’s arm.
Ali’d fretted over carrying her on his back, the fool. Said it would make the wound worse. She’d told him stopping constantly so he could adjust her in his arms again would take too long, so he might as well let her climb up on his back. He hadn’t actually shut up after that, but he’d kept his complaints to a dull roar. It was more than she could say of the drunk, whom she’d fantasized about killing for so long that she was surprised whenever his head bobbed back into view again.
Or—maybe she was seeing things.
What a silly thing to say; she was definitely seeing things. Zev was here, too, even though she could remember his face when she’d left him behind at the Orzammar market. Shianni walked beside him, her face happy and laughing whenever they passed one of those strange lights. Happy; Wen couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen Shianni happy. When they’d been girls, perhaps, playing pretend in their little secret room away from all the adults.
And also…
“Nelaros,” she whispered, and her lips cracked at the words.
Her betrothed looked over his shoulder, just past Wynne, and smiled at her.
There was a hole in his eye.
“Go away,” she said, and Alistair turned to look at her, alarmed, “Go away—you’re dead. You can’t have me; you're dead.”
Nelaros was holding the ring he’d died with. She could see it, winking gold in his hand. Back in Ostagar, Arianwen had bartered it for better armor without an ounce of sentimentality over the thing. Nelaros had been forced on her by her father; he’d tried to help as best he could, and then he’d died.
It was sad.
It was also not her problem.
“Catch her!” Alistair shouted, just as Wen unbalanced herself and would have toppled the both of them. The others rushed to help, though she only felt two sets of hands on her back.
“Do you think we should get someone from Orzammar to—”
“They’ll never come,” the dwarf growled, “Not even for a Grey Warden. Too safe and snug. You get her to the city or she dies.”
“—can’t—festering—up—at once—” Wynne was saying, but Arianwen couldn’t hear her. Nelaros was screaming too loud, and so was Shianni, and—
Pain in her leg, long and unending, stretching on and on. She knew she was moving, but it rose and fell with the waves of her nausea, and it was unclear how much of the feeling was real. At some point, she opened her eyes at last and found herself in a room that seemed dimly familiar. It was also…very crowded.
“Mama?” she murmured, and her mother pressed a cool hand to her brow. Tabris was so hot; so hot, she’d never felt the like before. But Adaia’s face was wrong, half-rotted and gone, for she was dead.
Butchered and dead.
Twelve years in the ground or more.
Arianwen’s eyes skated away over faces old and new, faces dreaded and beloved and long gone. There were her parents, yes, but also Loghain as she’d seen him before that last battle at Ostagar, the Lady of the Forest, serene and untouched, Zathrian with hate in his eyes, the villagers at Redcliffe she’d been unable to save, and on and on, and—
And Nelaros, still smiling even though she could see the far side of the room through his eye. His hand was outstretched, ring gleaming pristine and flat in his palm.
“Go away,” she screamed, and it seemed to her that some of them did—or backed up, at least.
“Go away, Nelaros; you’re dead. You’re dead. I don’t want you—you can’t make me—”
“Look at me,” an accented voice said, and even panting and panicked she knew it well.
Arianwen turned, eyes wild, and Zevran was there all at once, standing where her mother had stood.
“Don’t let him have me,” she begged, the words dragging out longer than they should, “Don’t let him—I won’t go—”
She couldn’t help it; she could feel the dead man there, at the end of the bed, waiting.
Waiting.
“Look at me,” Zevran said, and her eyes snapped back to him, “Do not look at them. Look at me. Do you see me?”
“Y-yes,” she said, and her back arched on the bed when something poker-hot slid into her leg. After a moment, Wen realized that she was the person making that horrible noise and clamped her teeth shut to keep the scream inside.
“Hold her,” a strange voice said, and Zevran was there, too, hands planted on her shoulders. Something else settled over her stomach, but she could not see it past her lover.
“Mi vida,” he said, when her eyes wandered to her mother's face over his shoulder, “See me. Look at me. I am here; they are ghosts. They could not possibly be more interesting than I, no?”
His eyes were warm, if tight at the corners, and even in her fever the sight of him steadied her. Yes; that was the right hair, the right eyes, the correct tattoo arching over his cheek. She knew the hands at her shoulders even past the haze of pain that radiated from her calf.
“I see you,” she said, and gasped when the heat cut close to the bone, “I see you. I see you.”
Wen went on saying it until the darkness reached for her and took her away. Even then, she might’ve sworn she could still see him there, like a glimmer of gold at the bottom of a long, deep river, waiting only for her to find him again.
|
Zevran was not pacing in the market.
That would be foolish. His Warden— the Wardens —had been gone for two weeks now; there was no reason at all to go to the market, find a convenient corner, wait patiently until the end of the morning, pester the guards for word from the tunnels, return to the alcove, and pace. Why, even the suggestion of such a thing was foolish.
So—Zevran was not pacing in the market.
He was marking time. That was all.
But because he was in the market he saw at once when the group came sprinting through the doorway, and it was clear just as immediately that something was very wrong.
His Warden hated even the suggestion that she was weak; she resisted help with her wounds unless it involved magic, limped her way down the road when she ought to have leaned on someone else…She was stubborn to a fault.
So Zevran knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that she would never have allowed Alistair to haul her onto his back and run through the streets of the city unless matters were dire.
He was moving before he could think better of it, vaulting over the railing instead of taking the stairs, landing at speed and running alongside the group.
“What happened to her?” he snapped, reaching up to touch her shoulder, to steady her as Wynne was doing on the other side.
“Later,” Alistair said, his face red with exertion, “Oghren, doors.”
Grumbling, the dwarf sped up and swung open the doors to the Diamond Quarter. Zevran kept pace easily, perturbed by how bony her shoulder was, how easy it was to keep her in place even though she plainly was not helping. When they passed from the shadows of the entryway and into the brighter street, he could see her better.
Her skin was yellowed in a way he did not like, sweaty and streaked with all sorts of muck. Tears had made tracks through it, sideways and angled, and her eyes were rolled half-up in her head now, revealing only the smallest slice of hazel. Her lips moved intermittently, as if she was speaking, but no sounds came out.
Very wrong was an understatement. He didn’t need to ask to know that she was…she was…
“What is the plan?” he asked grimly, dragging his eyes from her even as his grip on her shoulder tightened.
“Take her to Bhelen. He wants to be king? He gives her healers. We stashed his crown where he won’t find it. If he refuses to help, then he and the rest of them can hang.”
The human said this sharply enough that a nearby group of dwarves looked up at him with disapproval. Their group ignored this and kept running.
She was so cold under his hand. So cold.
They thundered into the palace and people got out of the way; a room was procured, and a healer. Zevran cared little for any of it, for it was clear that in this, at least, Alistair could be firm. All that mattered to him was that they allowed him to stay with her at the head of the bed when she got settled, that Wynne passed him the damp cloth to clean her with, that there was something he could be doing for her.
The weeks in the Deep Roads had not been kind. She looked older than she had before, even aside from the changes the sickness had wrought on her. New lines stretched from her eyes, and she was newly and badly scarred along one shoulder. Some sort of bite mark, it looked like, from a many-pincered mouth. Zevran cleaned it as carefully as he cleaned her mouth, even as her leathers were efficiently stripped from her and her wound exposed.
It was…Words were not sufficient. Bad was a drastic understatement, ugly was foolish, and wrong lacked a certain specificity. It stretched from ankle to knee along the meat of her calf, and the edges of it were jagged, as if it had been cut by a ragged and dull knife. The length of it was bordered by round, uneven marks along either side, like the suckers of an octopus. The jagged cut was seeping a foamy, pink substance interspersed by a milky yellow fluid, and neither of them looked like they should be coming out a person’s body at all.
What made a wound like that? Zevran was not certain that he wanted to know.
Her forehead burned under the damp cloth, and no matter how he wrung it out and placed it in water again, she never seemed to cool. As the healer reached forward and poured something over her wound, Arianwen opened her mouth wide and screamed. More than one of them around her bed flinched or took a step back, but Zevran kept his hand steady until her eyes rolled back again.
He heard mumbling from the healer, who dabbed off more of the fluid and produced another jar to pour into her wound. Arianwen flinched at this, her eyelids drifting shut and then tightening, and her teeth gritted against pain.
“Oh, mi vida,” Zevran murmured, his heart galloping in his chest, “Stay, stay; I know it hurts.”
No answer; but a moment later, she did open her eyes, focusing somewhere over Zevran’s shoulder.
“Mama?” she said, and something in Zevran’s chest, in his belly, lurched painfully.
“My mother is dead, too,” she’d said one night in the Brecilian Forest. She’d been oiling her old boots again, as she did nearly every night before bed, “She’s the one who taught me to fight. I owe her a great deal, if I see her again someday.”
“Mama?” Wen said again now, looking somewhere beyond him, and Zevran could not dismiss the sick feeling that wrapped a fist around his chest and squeezed.
“Warden?” he said tentatively, but it was as if she didn’t see him at all, and when he said “Arianwen?” she didn’t even blink.
The healer was doing something again, pouring some powder into her leg and holding the skin closed around it. Wen didn’t seem to notice at all, even when there was a faint hiss from her leg, as meat dropped into a hot pan. Her eyes wandered instead, looking at and beyond her assembled friends and companions.
He—he could not shake the feeling that she was going, somehow, that she was leaving him. Though she remained limp in the bed, he felt as if he was watching her walk away and—
“Go away,” she whispered, then sucked in a breath, “Go away!”
Alistair took a step back on the other side of the bed, and Oghren simply turned on his heel and left. She’d been looking at neither of them; Zevran could tell. She was looking at the foot of the bed instead, her eyes so wide they seemed as much white as hazel, her pupils pinpricks at the center.
“Go away,” she yelled again, and one of her hands twitched on the bed, as if reaching for her customary blades, “Nelaros; you’re dead. You’re dead. I don’t want you—you can’t make me—”
Nelaros? She had never said this thing to him; later—there would be a later—he would ask her who she was so frightened of. What he’d done, that his was the face she saw in her fever.
Now, Zevran had to do something—even if she couldn’t hear him, even if he had always been better at breaking than fixing things, even if there was nothing he could do, Zevran had to do something.
“Look at me,” he said, shifting forward and leaning over her to block more of the room. Slowly, impossibly, Wen’s eyes found his—and he saw that she knew him, impossible as that may be.
“Don’t let him have me,” she begged, her hand twitching on the sheets again, the words slurred and emphasized in all the wrong places, “Don’t let him—I won’t go—”
Her eyes wandered again, pulled to the foot of the bed.
“Look at me,” Zevran said desperately, his hand wrapping tight around hers, as her hand so often wrapped tight around the hilt of her dagger, and her eyes turned back to him, “Do not look at them. Look at me. Do you see me?”
The healer muttered something, there was another hiss, and weight shifted near the foot of the bed.
“Y-yes,” Arianwen said, and the healer cursed.
She screamed, her back arching on the bed, and her hand convulsed in his. He’d never seen her look like that—like the pain had forced her somewhere outside her body, like her face was made of wax instead of flesh and blood.
What could he do? What was there to do?
“Hold her,” the healer snapped at him, and Zevran let go of her hand to plant both hands on her shoulders instead. She was panting, sharp, short breaths that hardly seemed to reach her lungs, and her eyes were peering over his shoulder again.
No, he thought, with unexpected ferocity, No. You are not leaving me. Not yet.
“Mi vida,” Zevran said, planting one knee on the bed and leaning forward, “See me. Look at me. I am here; they are ghosts. They could not possibly be more interesting than I, no?”
He tried his best to smile at her, to reach for the familiar mixture of deflection and humor that had seen him through so many years of his life. He had no idea if he was successful; he could hardly hear himself at all. But Wen’s eyes found him again, and they were abruptly, uncomfortably lucid. As if she was looking not just at his face, but beyond it; as if she saw not just the tattoo on his face, his ears, his scars, but something far deeper and more essential.
This— this was why he took care never to look directly at her when they stood so near each other. He’d been afraid of just this: that she would see him, that her eyes would cut into him as sharp as steel beyond all the layers of artifice to…to whatever was left underneath.
That he would not be able to stop himself from wanting her to do it again.
“I see you,” Arianwen said, and though she gasped sharply her eyes did not stray from his, “I see you. I see you.”
She was fading; he could see her fading. Even so, as her eyelids began to droop and her back fell flat to the mattress again, her mouth went on shaping the words: I see you.
Zevran…did not think he’d ever felt so afraid before. He knew for a fact that he’d never felt this…this…fierce protectiveness, as if steel could stand between her and what came next. It was the stupidest, the worst possible moment to see her and know, but he did.
Whatever it was they were doing, at some point he’d slipped; he’d stopped doing things that pleased her so she would look upon him favorably, so she would hesitate to order the killing blow. At some point, he’d started doing them because he liked the way she looked when she was happy, because despite her cynicism toward the world there were a thousand thousand things she had never done. Because he wanted to be the one who showed her, who did them with her, who saw the way her eyes lit with surprise when he did something foolish like steal her sweets or buy her impractical underthings.
Because…though he’d often wondered if it existed at all, he…
Loved her.
He loved her. That’s what this was.
And she was dying.
No.
No, he would not allow it.
“Help her,” he snapped at Wynne, who was hovering behind the healer. She cast him a surprised look.
“What do you think I am doing, young man?” she said sternly. “I have been healing her this whole time. What else do you suppose is keeping the infection at bay? It must be treated directly; it is too deep for magic to touch unless I had a full gathering of mages to assist.”
He felt wild; he felt like his skills and composure were unweaving themselves somewhere vital inside him.
“Help her,” he snapped at the dwarven healer, who cast him a look of annoyance. “She can't —ah!”
The right words were somewhere out of reach, eluding him, but he reached for them anyway.
“She has to come back,” he said, removing his hands from her shoulders, for she was well and truly unconscious. There seemed no better place to put them; he held them in the air over her instead, trying to decide what to do with himself. They were…they were shaking; when that had begun, he could not say.
“Hey.”
Zevran looked up, his chest heaving, and met Alistair’s eyes. The other Warden was still half-lying over the foot of the bed, his hands clamped on her foot and knee, holding the wounded leg immobile for the healer.
“She’s going to be fine,” he said firmly, his eyes unusually clear, his voice unusually firm, “Hear me? She won’t go like this. Not her. Not without a fight.”
“Not her,” Zevran echoed, and let his hand rest on her shoulder, “Yes. Right.”
They went on in relative silence, until at last the healer proclaimed that he’d done what he could, that it would be several hours before they saw if it had made a difference.
For a moment, the room was quiet. Alistair pushed himself from the bed, squeezing his hands into fists and relaxing them again.
“You need to rest,” Wynne said, her arms crossed over her chest.
“I’m fine,” he said, though he plainly was not, and rolled his shoulders back, ducking his head, “I just need to stretch a little and I can—”
“Rest,” Wynne said sharply, and nodded to the adjacent room, “There are couches in there. You’ll hear right away if she wakes. Now go.”
Alistair went, drooping in his plate armor, fumbling for catches and buckles as he went. After a moment, there was a resonant clang from the next room and a muffled oath.
Zevran glanced in its direction, then returned his attention to Arianwen.
She looked…pale.
How wrong it was to see her like this—defenseless and wan. Arianwen was never defenseless, even at her most distracted, even in the throes of passion. It was one of the things that had first drawn him closer to her. At first, it had seemed as much a challenge as it was an attempt to make himself indispensable: sneak his way in behind her walls, make himself hard to kill, enjoy both his own safety and the pleasure of her company—simple.
How foolish he’d been not to realize she’d been doing the same to him.
“Zevran—” Wynne began, but he was already shaking his head.
“I am not going anywhere,” he said, “Do not ask me to go.”
The mage said nothing for a moment. At last, she sighed.
“Well, then. Well. Perhaps you might be more comfortable if you moved onto the bed.”
That was not an irrational suggestion, but Zevran took it a step further. He removed his sword belt and hung it at the head of the bed, in easy reach if he needed it. His knives followed, and he toed off the boots Arianwen had given him— real Antivan leather, she’d said, not looking at him, holding them out as if she wanted to touch as little of them as possible—before climbing onto the bed at her side.
Once, when he’d been sweating out a poison, she’d stayed with him just like this. He’d woken with his head in her lap, and as soon as she’d been assured he would be well she’d vanished back through the tent’s entrance. He’d been left blinking against the morning light, wondering if she’d been there all night, if he’d actually seen her at all.
Well—he would do the same for her now. As long as he could manage, he would give her a place to rest.
Her body remained limp, easy enough to maneuver into his lap. He whispered to her in Antivan while he did it, reminding her that it would be very silly for her to die like this, that she was meant to go out in battle with a ring of bodies around her, that she was beautiful in spite of her wounds, that he…
That he wanted her to stay. Here, with him.
This, he waited to tell her until Wynne had dozed off in the chair in the corner. Even in a language the mage did not speak, it did not seem like they were words for anyone else’s ears.
“Come back,” he told her over and over in a dozen ways, clever fingers untangling the knots in her hair, combing it away from her face, for this was the only thing he could think to do for her while he waited.
Arianwen slept on, chest rising and falling.
For a long time, that was the only sign that she went on living at all.
|
Someone was talking to her.
Wen knew this before she knew anything else: someone was talking to her.
She did not try to move at first; her limbs felt odd and distant and she knew it was best to leave them alone for now.
Ah; it was not that there was something wrong with her brain. They—Zevran, she knew his voice well—spoke in Antivan. Wen sighed upon realizing this and the words petered off, halted.
“Can you hear me?” he asked, and warm fingers traced the line where her hair met her face. Wen took another breath and let her eyes crack open.
The room was dim, which was a boon; even the little light present seemed almost too much. It was light enough to see him, though, peering at her upside down because she was lying in his lap.
That meant…something. She didn’t have the ability to sort through it and decide what, yet.
“Zevran,” she said, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say. His eyes blazed down at her, not relieved but intense, as if trying with all his power to divine some truth from his own name on her lips.
She remembered…a room of the dead. She remembered a room packed with ghosts.
She remembered him, holding her to the light, the last thread of sanity before a snap and a long, long drop into the Void. He’d been right there, then, too. Holding on.
Oh, Arianwen realized, her head still foggy, oh. So that’s what it feels like.
Safety was imaginary; safety was a comforting lie. But she knew a lot of people would die before Zevran let anything happen to her, and that was good enough to allow her to close her eyes again.
Before she fell asleep, she lifted one shaking hand, rested it on the cool pillow behind her head, and felt warm fingers twine with her own.