One time the hands of wind upon my hair
Could heal me like a mother's touch and kiss.
When I could give my airy griefs to the air
I never knew so sharp a thorn as this.
The joy of flower and wind and sighing bough—
It comes not back again for tears and rue.
A year agone I had not sought as now,
And found the sky a vault of empty blue.
- The Spanish Girl, Nora May French
"There is still the matter of Jowan. He performed the ritual, and did not deceive us. In a way, he saved Connor's life even though he killed Isolde. I am unsure what to make of this," Teagan said tiredly.
Arren frowned thoughtfully, nodding agreement. "I would like him released," he said.
"Released? This mage is a maleficar. Even if I ignore his crimes, I cannot simply unleash him on the land!" Teagan exclaimed, looking horrified.
"Released to me, Bann Teagan," Arren hastily clarified. "I promise that I have no plans to let him run free."
"Very well, do whatever you want with him," Teagan agreed, frowning at the elf. "Considering all you have done to aid myself and my family, I can hardly refuse you."
"Thank you, ser," Arren said. "And now I'd better get underway – it's a long way to Denerim to see this Brother Genitivi of whom you spoke."
"Are you sure there's nothing else I can do before you go?" Teagan asked.
Arren gave the man a warm smile. "No, we're well restocked and well rested, better to be underway."
"Of course. Let me see you out," Teagan said. "I'll send the guards to fetch the mage from the dungeon."
"Are you sure about this?" Alistair asked quietly once Teagan had made his final farewells to the group and headed back into the castle. "I mean, he is a blood mage... but I suppose this is an unusual situation."
"I say the boy could be of use to us," Morrigan said.
"He is dangerous, my dear. If not to others, than surely to himself," Wynne interjected.
"Which reminds me – Alistair, I want you to stick close to him," Arren said.
"Me? Why me!"
"Almost a templar, remember? I want you to be ready to drain him if it becomes necessary. Or knock him out if he's cutting his wrists for other purposes," he added grimly.
"You think he might want to kill himself?" Alistair exclaimed, looking shocked.
"I think it's at least a possibility," Arren said, then gave a slight nod of his head to where the courtyard entrance to the cellars had just swung open, permitting a pair of guards to lead out their prisoner. Alistair turned to look at their newest companion.
His black hair hung in lank, greasy strands around his unhealthily pale face. He staggered as the guards led him out into the sunlight, wincing and then lowering his head, raising one hand to shade his watering eyes. The reek of the dungeon clinging to his clothes reached them before he did; moldering straw, rotting food, dust, rodent feces, unwashed body, and the sharp tang of old urine.
"All yours, wardens," one of the guards said as they drew close, and setting his hand in the middle of Jowan's back, gave him a push forward. He probably meant it to be a gentle one, but misjudged just how weak the mage was; Jowan stumbled forward, crashing directly into Alistair, and would have fallen to the ground if the warden hadn't caught him.
"Maker, he's skin and bones!" was Alistair's first thought as his fingers closed on the man's arms and he realized how light and fragile-seeming the mage was. His second thought was one of distaste for having had to come in contact with the filthy man at all, especially when he saw something moving in Jowan's hair, just inches below his own face. He hastily righted the mage, feeling glad that his hands were safely separated from any real contact by his metal gauntlets. Until he thought of how bruising the grip of his startled catch likely had been.
"Sorry," Jowan wheezed. "Can't see properly... it's too bright..."
"It will take his eyes a while to adjust, after being in a dark cellar for so long," Wynne agreed. "And I don't think we'll be able to travel far today. He'll need some healing and a good meal or two in his stomach first."
"And a bath," Morrigan said firmly, looking at the mage as if being this close to him made her skin crawl. "Though I can at least take care of..." she trailed off, eyes unfocusing for a moment as a nimbus of energy formed around her hands, then lazily floated over to surround the mage.
"Thank you!" Jowan said, his voice momentarily firm with honest appreciation.
"What was that?" Alistair asked, puzzled. He'd never seen Morrigan use a spell quite like that before.
"I've made sure he is not accompanied by any of the livestock he'd picked up. 'Tis a simple spell – a variation on what I do when I wish to absorb the life force of an enemy. Only rather more... wide-focused."
Wynne was nodding approvingly. "Most disciplines of magic have spells that can be turned to the same purpose – one thing you need never fear around a mage is being bitten by bedbugs."
"Unless you raise the mage's ire, and then you may be very well-bitten indeed," Morrigan said, then turned and started walking away, clearly impatient to be moving.
Arren looked puzzled as he fell into step beside her. "Then why didn't he do that himself?"
"Magebane," Morrigan, Wynne, Jowan and Alistair answered in unison, to Arren's startlement. Mouse, Arren's mabari, gave a short wuff, as is to say that even he knew that.
"They kept me dosed with it all the time I was imprisoned," Jowan said softly. "Couldn't even raise enough mana to light a candle, if I'd had a candle to light. I was overdue for my next dose when you reached the castle, or I'd never have had the mana to perform the ritual. They... dosed me again when I was returned to the dungeon, afterwards. It will be a day or two before I have any power again."
Arren grunted acknowledgement. The party continued on in silence, heading across the castle bridge and up into the hills around Redcliffe, where they'd left Sten and Leliana encamped with their gear.
The first order of business, once they reached camp, was to find some clean clothes for the mage, then to send him off to the nearby stream with Alistair in attendance and some good strong soap.
"Do I really need a guard?" Jowan asked worriedly as the pair of them reached the small pond along the stream that was currently serving duty as a bathing spot for the group.
"I'm no happier about this than you are, believe me," Alistair assured him. "But Arren wants an eye kept on you and he volunteered me for the duty. Considering your only other real options are a qunari who believes mages should be kept on a leash, and an Antivan assassin who would spend the entire time making lascivious comments, you're getting off lucky."
"Oh," Jowan said softly, looking if possible even paler than before. He turned his back, and unfastened his robe, dropping it to the ground in a noisome heap before wading out into the water, hissing at how cold it was. He crouched down, ducking under the surface and rising again, scrubbing at himself with handfuls of water and sand from the stream bed to remove the worst of the grime from his skin.
Alistair sat down on a nearby rock, wishing he'd taken the time to remove his armour before accompanying the mage to the stream. It was likely going to take the mage a while to get clean. On the other hand the part of him that had paid attention to his templar training was yammering "Blood mage! Smite it!" in the back of his head, and feeling heartily glad of the nice safe thick armour between him and the maleficar. Not exactly the most rational of reactions when all the man was doing was bathing, but then much of what the chantry had tried to inculcate in him as a trainee had little to do with rationality, at least in his opinion. Though a lot of what they'd had to say about blood mages struck him as eminently logical. He really hoped Arren knew what he was doing, taking on Jowan as one of their group. On the other hand their makeup was already so eccentric that a blood mage would probably fit right in.
It wasn't until Jowan turned to wade back to shore and get the soap that Alistair realized he'd been staring at the man – keeping an eye on a potential hostile, the voice in the back of his head corrected – and found himself frowning at just what he was seeing. Apart from a painfully gaunt, sickly pale, almost naked man, that is. His arms and legs were dotted with scars and a few scabs, many of the marks still angry and red.
"I thought you said you only ever did blood magic once before that ritual yesterday?" he asked sharply.
Jowan looked up, startled pale grey eyes briefly meeting Alistair's before he flushed and looked away. "Three times, if you include the one time I ever succeeded at it before deciding that I really didn't want to learn any more of it," he said softly. "That was a year before my... escape."
"Then what are all those marks from?" Alistair demanded suspiciously, pointing at Jowan's scarred limbs.
The mage's flush deepened, and he hunched in on himself. "Arlessa Isolde thought I might know how to cure the Arl. She... had me questioned," he said, voice flat and emotionless. "It... got even worse, after Connor became possessed."
Questioned... tortured, Alistair realized, feeling sick to the pit of his stomach. "Oh," he responded, quietly. He didn't know what else to say. Jowan was still standing motionless. "Get back to your bath," he ordered brusquely.
Jowan didn't say anything, just picked up the soap and waded back out into the steam.
Jowan was a sight when the two of them headed back to camp. He was wearing a pair of leggings contributed by Zevran – as lean as he was, they were actually a good fit for him, a little loose if anything – and a much-patched old shirt of Alistair's that hung on him like a tent. He was considerably less broad and a good bit shorter than the warrior, and as a result looked more like a child trying to wear his father's clothing than an adult man. They'd buried his robe before leaving the stream; as stained, filthy, and worn as it was, it wasn't worth trying to salvage it. Alistair suspected they'd buried a healthy dose of bad associations along with it, judging by the nature of some of the stains.
Arren was crouched by the fire stirring the pot of stew. They only had one good-sized cook pot, and all it ever contained was stew, except when they were running short on rations or were having poor hunting, when it contained soup instead. Stew was better, since the leftovers tended to solidify into a thick mush as it cooled, and could be easily carted along to the next campsite. They'd only twice had to wash out the pot and start a new batch since Arren had taken over the cooking. Once when Alistair had been entrusted with reheating the stew and managed to burn half of it onto the bottom of the pot, and once when someone had left the lid off and Mouse had gotten into it overnight, adding plenty of drool as a condiment that none of them particularly wanted to try out.
Never-ending stew might have grown boring after a while, except it was rarely the same twice – except, again, when they were running short on things – the complex flavour changing from day to day as Arren, Zevran and Morrigan threw in different herbs, foraged edibles, and whatever game anyone happened to get in their travels. Alistair and Morrigan had both been worried at first about the assassin being allowed to add anything at all to the pot, but Arren had insisted they trust him, and so far the Antivan had managed to refrain from poisoning them.
Wynne walked over as soon as she saw the two of them, and insisted on examining the mage on the spot. She frowned and hummed and clicked her tongue, and occasionally cast small spells, and by the time she pronounced him well enough "for now", he actually had a bit of colour back in his cheeks.
"Don't take a very big helping of stew," she advised the mage. "You've been kept on poor rations – and too little of them! – for too long. It's going to take your body a while to readjust. I want you to eat only a little bit at any time, though you may snack frequently throughout the day. And I'll mix you up a potion to prevent digestive upset."
"Thank you, Wynne," Jowan said softly.
He was, Alistair was noticing, a very timid and subdued man. Not at all like any of the other maleficarum he'd encountered in their travels. They tended to be... loud, and self-assured. Aggressive, even, and cruel. Comparing Jowan to them was like... like... like comparing a dormouse to Mouse. For the first time he began to think that Arren's decision to recruit the mage to their group hadn't been as foolish as it may have seemed.
Alistair's tent wasn't particularly big, so fitting two bedrolls into it was a tight squeeze, especially since it also had to contain Alistair's armour – which couldn't be left out where the damp might get at it – and which even stacked in as small a compass as it could be occupied almost as much room as a third person. A third person in a fetal position, true, but still a substantial portion of the floor space at one end of the tent. And then there was his shield, and his sword, and his other sword, and his backpack of clothes and personal oddments.
Jowan, on the other hand, had nothing at all, not even owning the clothes on his back at present. Sten had contributed a second shirt so he'd having something to change into at night. If he'd looked like a child in Alistair's shirt, he looked like a toddler in Sten's.
It was... odd, to have another person in the tent with him, to hear quiet breaths nearby and the faint rumblings of someone else's digestion. The last time he'd shared a tent had been... oh yes. Before Ostagar. It had been his brother wardens then, all of them divided among several too-small four-man tents on the journey from Denerim to Ostagar. Four man tents, but with their numbers requiring them to cram five to six people on each. You couldn't take a deep breath without having someone's knee in your gut or foot in your ear. Or worse, Habert's flatulence in your nose, if you'd been unlucky on what tentmates you had that night. But it had been friendly and comfortable, surrounded by the tingling warm presence of his brothers-by-taint, with long wandering random conversations, growing increasingly slurred and disjointed while they waited for sleep to claim them.
He blinked, and blinked again, waiting for the suspicious moisture in his eyes to dry before rolling over, back to Jowan.
Green sky, seething with motion like curdled milk being stirred or porridge at a slow bubble, thick and clotted. Dragon that looked black in the green light, save for its pitiless silver-white eyes. It screamed, head snaking from side to side, a blast of blinding blue-white flame bursting forth from its straining jaws, bringing out streaks of dark purple-red colour where the reflected light highlighted its scaled coat. It hated. It wanted. It commanded. He felt the urge to answer, to follow its insidious summons to it, to worship it and obey it and slay for it, killing and killing without end until flesh and muscle failed...
He gasped as he woke up, shaking and sweating. That had been a bad one. He wondered if it had awakened Arren too. Assuming Arren was actually sleeping, and not curled up with the witch somewhere.
He was still breathing in deep, shuddering breaths when he realized he wasn't the only one having a nightmare. Jowan was jerking in his sleep, head tossing from side to side. Faint mutters escaped his lips as he moved, disjointed words, little fragments of words.
"No... don't know... can't do... please, no... not Lily, not Li... no!"
Unthinking, Alistair reached out and touched the man's shoulder. He jerked upright, a cut-off scream escaping his throat even as he awoke.
"Oh, Maker!" Jowan moaned, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees, knotting his hands into his hair, back hunched. His shoulders shook.
"Jowan? Are you okay?" Alistair asked softly, reaching out as if to clasp his shoulder, then stopping, hand still some distance away. One thing you learned fast sharing a tent with wardens of assorted martial disciplines – never touch someone unexpectedly, especially when they were in a state about something.
Jowan drew a ragged breath, straightened slightly, swabbing at his face with the end of one overly-long sleeve. "Yes, I'm... I'm okay," he managed to say, voice breaking on the words. "Just a nightmare. I'm sorry for waking you..."
Alistair snorted. "Don't be. I was already awake anyway. Nightmare of my own," he explained softly. "Need anything? A drink of water?"
Jowan gave a shaky laugh. "No. I'm fine. Thank you for asking." he said, then lay back down. They both lay there, saying nothing further, until sleep eventually reclaimed them each in turn.
Alistair and Jowan walked along side by side, some distance back from the others. They hadn't had any footwear suitable for the mage, and he was out of shape after spending so many weeks confined in a small space, so his pace was slow and careful, and increasingly footsore.
They reached the top of one of the innumerable small grassy hills in the area. Jowan was blowing like a bellows from the uphill walk. Alistair pointed at a small outcrop of chalky rock. "Sit and catch your breath for a few minutes," he suggested.
Jowan looked worried. "The others will outpace us..."
"They already are. Don't worry, just sit and rest for a bit, you'll travel better for it."
"All right," Jowan said hesitantly, and sat down. He frowned at Alistair, standing patiently nearby. "Don't you... want to rest, too?"
"I am," Alistair told him cheerfully. "When you're wearing heavy armour, just not having to walk for a while is a rest. And believe me, standing in armour is much preferable to sitting or lying down in it. Though I can sleep in it if I really have to. Don't recommend it though. Not unless you're the type that enjoys punishing yourself. It's like trying to bed down on a random collection of small stones and tree roots. Hard edges poking into you everywhere."
Jowan gave a short, surprised laugh, then sighed and leaned back, propping himself up with arms outstretched behind him, tilting his face up to the sky and closing his eyes. He took several deep, appreciative breaths through his nose, a faint smile twitching at the corners of his mouth.
"I love the wind," he said quietly after a moment, rolling his head from side to side a little, as if rubbing against the breeze that was teasing his thick black hair. "In the tower, it was the only bit of the outside world I ever got to experience regularly. Most of the windows are very small and high up on the wall, higher than even a tall ladder can reach, and a lot of them have broken over the years and never been repaired; too much hard work to get the glass, I suppose. Anyway, there's a sort of a magic field in them, to keep the rain and birds and insects out, but the wind comes right through. You'll hear it, moving around way up above you in the vaults of the ceiling. And some times," he said, voice slowly dropping, slowly getting dreamier. "Sometimes a gust or two of it will swirl down, to floor level, and the smells... Lake water and sun warmed grass, or the bite of snow, or that special clean smell of rain... so good..."
Alistair found an unexpected smile crossing his own lips as Jowan fell silent. "I know what you mean," he said quietly. "Sometimes I'd be stuck indoors for weeks on end – not as bad as the tower, I know, but still, more than long enough, especially when I'd had so much freedom before being sent to the chantry. I missed so many different things, and it was always the smells the air brought in that made it worst. I remember being so homesick I was weeping, just from the smell of horse manure on a sweltering summer day..."
Jowan opened his eyes, gave Alistair a puzzled look. "The chantry?" he asked cautiously.
"Yes. Oh, I guess you don't know the background of anyone in our little travelling circus, do you. I'm so used to everyone now I forget what an odd lot we are. I was sent off to the chantry when I was ten. Spent the next nine years there, about half of it in training to be a templar"
Jowan bolted to his feet, all colour draining from his face. "You're a templar!" he exclaimed, looking about ready to bolt for the far hills. Assuming his legs could even carry him that far.
"Woah, woah, calm down," Alistair said, alarmed, holding up his empty hands. "Trained as a templar. I'm a Grey Warden, not a templar, for which I gave daily thanks, thank you very much."
"Oh," Jowan said, looking slightly less nervous. He bit on his lip, ducking his head and looking away. "Sorry, it's just..."
"I know. Templars plus mages equals bad combination. Well, it's not supposed to, but that's how it seems to work out more often then not, doesn't it?" he said bitterly. "You know, we're not supposed to be jailors. We're supposed to be guardians, there to protect the mages, not there to imprison them. At least that's what I think. Though I don't believe the Revered Mother or the Divine would necessarily agree with my interpretation of things, unfortunately. Anyway, we'd better get a move on."
Jowan nodded and fell into step beside him again. A good foot further away to the side than he'd been before their stop, Alistair noted, and felt... disappointed. He always hated seeing people change as they found out more about his past.
Jowan was nervous around Alistair for the next couple of days, then seemed to decide that Alistair's templar training wasn't anything to worry about after all, and relaxed again. The group, meanwhile, had encountered the Feddics again, and reunited with their stockpiled odds and ends, and Bodahn's 'discounted' gear, they'd managed to put together some more things for the mage to wear and use. A staff they'd picked up somewhere that had been too good to sell off right away, but not quite good enough to replace the staffs Wynne and Morrigan were already using, some leather boots, leather leggings, and a clean new shirt more his size, a backpack, changes of smallclothes, socks...
All the walking in the sun and the regular good food had the mage filling out and gaining colour, his skin luckily having decided to tan rather than burn. Apart from his nose, which turned alarmingly red the first day and then peeled sheets of skin the second, before finally settling down to joining the rest of his skin in turning an even golden brown.
He was walking much more jauntily, and even essaying occasional jokes with the other group members, offering them shyly as if uncertain of their reception, and smiling happily when people smiled and laughed, and joked in return. He seemed to blossom in the face of his easy acceptance by the other members of the rag-tag group, gaining quickly in confidence. Alistair began to suspect that the biggest – and perhaps only – problem the mage had ever really had was that he'd felt so much alone and an outsider even in a tower crammed full of other people. Having the very real threat of tranquillity looming overhead constantly couldn't have helped him much either.
Alistair found himself enjoying the man's continued company a lot more than he'd have expected to. Jowan took such a deep, simple pleasure in so many little things, like his love of the wind, his perpetual delight in bright flowers and sunsets and the natural beauty of the world around them. He'd been astonished when they'd come across one of the rare giant trees while passing through the edges of the Brecilian forest, staring up in open-mouthed awe at the towering tree, so big around at its base that the entire group of them would have been unable to stretch their arms around it.
It made Alistair feel like he was seeing things for the first time again too, recalling to him the wonder he'd felt as a child. He found himself calling things to the mage's attention; a colourful snake sunning itself on a rock near the path, the brightly-edged shelf fungus growing all up the side of a half-dead tree, a fat green-and-brown spider crouched in the middle of a perfect dew-flecked web. Seeing Jowan's face light up in delight at each offering never failed to bring a smile to his own lips.
Most nights now they talked for a while before sleep, comparing being raised in the circle and being raised in a stable and the chantry, finding many points of similarity between their two experiences. Sleeping in dormitories, for one. What it was like to be small and scrawny and too smart and picked upon. Special memories... an unexpected gift of a golem doll to a small child who spent his days in a hay-filled stall, a sparrow that had somehow flown into the tower one day and been an astonishment to a young mage who'd heard of birds but had never seen one apart from illustrations in books and the occasional distant dark speck glimpsed through a high window.
"That was when I realized that the world outside was real, that the things I was reading about in books actually existed somewhere," Jowan confessed, then smiled ruefully. "Of course, I still had to learn the different between fact and fiction. I believed some quite astonishingly erroneous things when I was younger."
Alistair snorted, a bitter smile briefly touching his own lips. "Don't we all, at some time or another? That we are or aren't wanted. Or cared for. Or loved."
"Yes," Jowan whispered quietly in the darkness of their tent. "I think that's why I..." he abruptly stopped talking. He didn't say anything for a long moment, then sniffed, a suspiciously juicy sound. Crying silently, Alistair realized, recognizing the sound all too well. He didn't say anything, just rolled over and gave the other man's shoulder a reassuring squeeze. Jowan took a deep, shaky breath. Neither of them spoke again that night, both lost for a while in their own dark thoughts of the past before sleep claimed them.