It wasn't easy to keep up with him. Though easy to spy, standing head and shoulders above others in the crowded marketplace, that same height gave him the advantage of a longer stride and she had to move swiftly to keep up. The crowd that parted like water around him hindered her as she tried to follow, and she could only watch as he moved on ahead.
She'd been watching him for weeks now.
He wasn't a typical refugee; she'd spotted that straight off. He had the defeated air, the hunched shoulders, the listless gaze they all shared. But there was something more, a nervous air the others didn't have. As if whatever he'd fled from had followed him ... or was already here, waiting.
And she was pretty sure it wasn't the Blight or the darkspawn he'd been fleeing.
So when the rumours had spread through Darktown, she'd known what it was that caused him to start at shadows. The same things she feared herself.
The glint of light off steel armour. A sword emblazoned upon a chest. A faceless helm.
She did as he did: kept her head down, blended into the rest of the human refuse down here in the open cesspit that was Darktown. She had grown to know the secret ways, the old abandoned tunnels where once slaves of the Tevinter Imperium had made their escape. Paths where no man in armour could follow. And if sometimes her empty belly kept her awake at night, she counted it a small price to pay for being slender enough to slip through the narrowest cracks.
Slender as she was, there was no passing through this crowd. It was an impassive thing, a sullen throng that cared nothing for her haste. She was but one more soul adrift in this great city, unable to do more than watch as he strode on with an air of determination, oblivious to her footsteps fallen behind. What was she to him? One more refugee in the unwashed crowd.
And when she passed that way and plucked a stray feather from a sharp point of stone, she would smile to herself and wonder if he, too, blessed his half-starved frame. Everyone was starving down here in Darktown. It was a daily fact of life. That and the chokedamp, and the occasional sinkhole appearing after weeks of rain.
He would disappear for a few days here, a couple of weeks there; and when the lantern stayed unlit for day after day, she would stare at it and wonder. She would have known if they'd caught him, of course - the news would have been all through Darktown in a matter of hours. Everyone knew it when the armoured feet came with their heavy tread, down here in the labyrinthine caves stretching in all directions beneath the ancient City of Chains, just as the slaves of old had known when their masters came in pursuit.
Still, she breathed easy again when the small flame danced in the lantern once more. It was a small beacon of hope to her, a sign that all was well in her world again – and that perhaps one day, it would be well to all like her.
She wasn't sure just when she'd started to think of him in such terms, as a beacon of hope. But he was such to so many now. Not just those he helped in the clinic, but to all those he brought out through the Underground.
And where was her beacon now? She'd lost sight of him in the press. She stopped and looked around, fists clenched at her sides in frustration. From around her, she caught fragments of low conversation, whispers, gossip. "- from the Underground -" She froze, a tendril of fear wrapping around the knot of worry that clenched uneasily in her stomach, leaving her queasy as she glanced around her.
She'd known of the Underground, of course. Darktown had never stopped being a path to freedom. Once it had been for slaves of the magisters -now those who fled were simply fugitives from a different kind of slavery. They'd all heard the rumours of the Gallows; seen the ranks of the Tranquil growing steadily. She'd been there once and seen for herself the curious blank eyes of a woman whose forehead was still raw with the blazing sun brand, and she'd had nightmares for weeks afterwards.
And that was before.
Before everything changed – before she changed. Before the morning when she'd been trying to kindle the dead fire back to life, except the fire had been cold for hours and the damp had gotten into the wood, and try as she might she just couldn't get the kindling to take a spark from the flint and steel, and in frustration she'd done – something. A surge from somewhere deep inside, a fiery jolt down her arm except it didn't hurt, this felt right and strong and quickfire and light, and suddenly the wood caught and was ablaze.
And she'd sat back and looked at her hands and felt more afraid than she ever had in her life – not even when the soldiers had come and told everyone to flee right now, for Ostagar had fallen and death was following after. Because dead was dead, but Tranquil was something else, and everyone knew what happened to bad mage girls who didn't do what the Templars told them. And now the Templars would be coming for her.
Except the Templars didn't come. Because after all, who was there who could tell them that she had magic? Her mother had died of the Blight even before Ostagar, and her father had died on the ship from Ferelden. Her brother had died of the fever not long after they arrived, for there was no Healer then to heal him.
Fear had given way to tears for a while. If the magic had come sooner, perhaps her brother would not have died, or her father. Perhaps Mother would still be here.
But no, may as well have blamed her menses for not making her a woman sooner, or the moon for rising or the seasons for turning. Things happened in their natural time, and the wishes of lonely girls would not make them come sooner. And though the magic came – and in time, she learned how to make it come at will instead of in frustration, and for more useful things besides lighting stubborn fires – still, she was untaught; and though the Gallows were a prison, still the lowliest apprentice behind those prison bars was better skilled than she in such things.
She wasn't the only fugitive from the Templars in the warrens of Darktown, though, and she knew it. She'd been fortunate to find work with Lirene as a messenger and go-for, and as she'd steadily proven more trustworthy she'd been relied on for more secret work, more dangerous messages – dangerous to those sending and receiving them should they be intercepted, and to her should she be caught. For the penalty for helping an escaped mage was often to hang – particularly for a penniless Ferelden brat. But for an unschooled apostate who'd not turned herself in? She'd be one of the Tranquil in the Gallows courtyard before she could blink. And dead was dead, but Tranquil was something else.
And so she'd become part of the Underground. And sometimes she would help guide escaping mages through the winding passages and secret ways she knew so well, to the smugglers' caves and beyond, because who better to trust than a girl who conjured fire in her hand and risked as much as they, if not more.
And as time passed, she learned to do more than just conjure fire as this mage taught her a little, and that mage showed her a way to do something, and another whispered a few hasty words of advice.
And then he came, and her eyes had been opened to so much more.
He didn't know her name; he didn't really seem aware of her presence at all. Perhaps he thought her just one more apostate hiding amongst so many others as he was. She could tell he'd come from a Circle; she'd caught a glimpse of his grimoire once – just the once, mind. She heard rumours he was a Grey Warden, but that was just gossip, surely – everyone knew that no-one ever left the Wardens. Once a Warden, always a Warden, her father had said.
But he gave her courage. He worked tirelessly, selflessly, always working – either in the clinic or else with the Underground.
It didn't surprise her when the Hawke came seeking the Healer's aid. It seemed... right, somehow. The Hawke came often after that; sometimes alone, sometimes with others. Often the dwarf would be there; and she got used to seeing the dwarf quite regularly even without the Hawke. Funnily enough the Carta stopped turning up to annoy the Healer around the same time the dwarf appeared.
And the Hawke was a friend to mages. The Hawke and the Healer; the mage could walk abroad with his noble friend by his side and no Templar could touch him. And the stories said that they were more than friends - lovers, some whispered. And if a mage could love and be loved by a noble... well, it gave a cold and lonely mage girl hope at night, to carry into her dreams.
She'd found the pages one day: a few close-spaced pages of hasty scrawl, screwed up and cast aside. She didn't know why – maybe because it was something of him –
She touched the slender bundle briefly. A talisman over her heart. His words to guide her even when she could no longer see him. Where was he striding so fearlessly, the light of freedom burning in his amber eyes as if all the Templars in the world had ceased to exist? As if none were there to see the staff slung so casually over his shoulder, crying his very nature to all who saw it? Where was his Hawke?
She'd never been a strong reader, and reading matter was scant in Darktown beyond the occasional ribald pamphlet like that ridiculous "Hard in Hightown" series (but oh, hadn't she swooned over the tragic blond apostate with the golden locks?) but she had steadily pored over those few precious pages over and over, slowly speaking aloud the more difficult words until she understood and had committed them to memory; and they had lit a flame in her mind that burned as bright as any magefire she'd ever called from her hands. It sang in her blood like the magic itself. The precious pages of the manifesto she kept folded inside her dress, and the words sang to her soul as nothing had since the deaths of her mother, her father, her brother; since the first day she'd lain eyes on him and known him for what he was. They kept the hope of freedom burning in her heart when all else seemed ashes. They were a clarion call; a beacon of light, her lantern in the darkness.
But the lantern outside the clinic had been dark for weeks now. No-one knew where the Healer had gone. The mood on the streets was one of restlessness and rebellion. The Knight Commander ruled the city in all but name, and the Templars were everywhere. As spring gave way to summer and tempers frayed in the heat, the city was slowly simmering to a fever pitch and it seemed the whole of Kirkwall was ready to tear itself apart – a festering boil left too long unlanced.
She had stood here not long before, when the news ripped through the crowd like wildfire that Meredith and Orsino had fought – not with magic and sword, but with words and anger that bit just as surely as any blade and scorched as fierce as any spell, lines drawn in the sand. And the Hawke had stood between them. She knew then that matters were coming to a head; the poison and corruption within the city's heart had to be purged.
The city needed a healer.
And now as she stood there and watched that beacon of fire rise into the sky, the crowd falling silent around her, she knew the Healer had answered.
And then the whispers raised to shouts and cries. "The Rite of Annulment!" she heard, and then - "For the Chantry!" from some, and from others, "For Justice!" And from yet others, "To the Gallows!"
Yes. To the Gallows. For dead was dead, but Tranquil was something else.
She threw down her basket and ran to join the throng, and her voice was as loud as any there as the magic sang in her blood.
"For Justice!"