Not for victory
but for the day's work done
Te deum - Charles Reznikoff
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Ferelden greets them with hoar frost.
It's as befitting their return as anything, Loghain supposes, as they slowly but surely make their way from the ship to dry, icy land. They've suffered a couple of losses over the past few days but nothing unexpected, mostly a handful of the most severely injured Wardens.
Beside him, Elissa is quiet and hard like the winters in the North, observing their surroundings with a grimness that has lasted since she first ordered their retreat. There had been little else to do save dying like animals, but she had only reluctantly accepted it, the anger boiling around the insight still visible in her expression. It echoes in him; he can all but taste the ashes of her disappointment in his own mouth, the way it mingles with relief and selfishness.
"You risked a great deal going to Orlais," he says in a slow, careful voice. He means everything but knows that such dramatic statements rub his commander the wrong way and close all angles for further discussion and there is too much to talk about at present to needlessly prickle her ego and wound her pride.
"Yes," Elissa concedes. She sounds distant.
He inhales, impatience like a surge in him.
"That was incredibly foolish and rash, even for you," he blurts, too quickly. He feels strained to the very border of his own capacity and tired far beyond its limits; recent events that are still tearing at his momentum - not to mention recent years that have left him out of practice as far as coaxing goes. Cailan had always deserved much less subtlety than his father. "The risk was too great."
Something hard and red-hot flashes in her eyes. "No."
Loghain looks straight ahead. They sit in a carriage making its way from the coast to Vigil's Keep, huddled up among their belongings and still carrying the marks of travel and battle on their skins. As Elissa shifts in her seat and he moves a little to give her more room, their twin shadows slide against the walls, wavering somewhat before coming to rest again. He exhales, trying to get rid of the sensation of standing on the verge of an avalanche, reaching for thin air.
"Leaving Ferelden open to invasion-" he begins. It feels, even to himself, like a bad imitation of the man he used to be. It's evident by the glint in his commander's eyes that she agrees.
"Yes, instead of defending my country with a dozen untrained Wardens at my back, I decided to seek answers to a myriad of questions," she snaps. "I will not apologise for that. Nor will I apologise for answering the call for help from a fellow Warden."
Fellow Wardens, Loghain thinks, suddenly even more tired. He still has all the names in his mouth – names of allies and enemies, of prisoners and captors – and the memories of prison cells and his own scattered thoughts.
Orlesian prison cells, he had thought. How drearily fitting.
Trust the bloody Orlesians to wreak havoc even within their own country, he had thought, carefully misremembering his own recent history.
Damn you, Maric, he had thought, bitterly. If you had only endured on that damn throne none of this would have happened.
He'd heard voices through all kinds of layers – pain, delusion, exhaustion – and one of them had been hers, as dark and angry as he had remembered it. You've captured my general. Why? Then, much later her voice had been a breath away, just over his ear, hot and heavy and cracked: don't you dare leave me now.
He hadn't. Though he can't take much pride in that since his continued existence is more a result of healing magic – and possibly some old-fashioned Fereldan sturdiness - than his own survival skills.
As far as rescue mission goes, Elissa's had been near perfection. From what she has told him during the journey back – in the rare, fleeting moments they have had to themselves – she had already helped the Orlesian lieutenant defeat the rebelling fraction of the Orlesian Order and bring about some kind of fragile truce. Loghain and the others who had been held captive in a fort near Montsimmard had been on the way home as she puts it.
Loghain is uncertain whether or not he believes her. There's a stubbornness in her that rivals his own and he has not been above lying about similar missions in his past, he thinks, watching her now. Perhaps it doesn't matter. A jolt of warmth thaws his profound sense of annoyed dread as he realises that they are actually in Ferelden again. That he did not need to die like a dog among Orlesians. That for all the odds that state that they – and Loghain in particular - will die rather soon, it did not have to be just yet.
That she had, in every sense of the word, saved him.
"You wasted no time in Orlais, at least," he offers. He means it as a compliment on her strategic mind but it comes out of his mouth as a condescending rebuke. His time alone in that cell has not done wonders to his already rusty grasp of politeness and common curtsy. In addition he feels a frayed sort of frustration with his own contradictory ideas and impressions. Part of him is furious with her for marching across the border; another part of him admires her resolute response to a horrible situation. She has done well; she should never have come.
A good night's sleep in a proper bed, he tells himself. That's what he needs to sort it all out. And a bath.
Elissa gives him a long glance, raking a hand through her hair and crossing her legs. There's a strain in her face that he does not like, shades of too much responsibility and too much care. She has told him once in a half-drunken state that she is selfish enough to survive all of this, that she nurses the spoiled brat in her heart so that she will never be the selfless martyr of goodness her role might demand of her. It's difficult to believe her, difficult to even try.
"Leonie quickly managed to get aid from the Antivans," she says. "They received her letters and had already begun investigating the news about the First Warden themselves."
Naturally they would have. As would the scarce Fereldan Wardens, had they known. Loghain might have advised against it – lines are removed and maps redrawn, even his heart has shown signs of alteration, but he has shed blood for Ferelden for so long it's become a habit he cannot break himself of and he is nothing if not stubborn – but that's what they would have done, all the same.
He finds a certain grace in that thought now, watching Amaranthine appear in the distance.
There is, he has often thought over these past two years, a freedom in the chalice the Wardens offer. It's not without darkness, nor is it unconditional. Freedom never is. Yet the fact remains that nothing besides joining this woman's Order would have offered him such a respite from his former life, his past. Here, sensing the taut lines and too-sharp angles of the Warden-Commander's body against his own contours again, he is reminded of the truths of this life: that he's ensnared in a hopeless, wretched cause that will be the death of him but that he is no longer trapped.
He looks at the packs on the floor of the carriage, the way they seem to swallow every empty space. I've taken most records I could find she had told him as they were boarding the ship back to Ferelden, shouldering a large sack of what apparently is recruiting records and old journals kept by the Wardens in the cities she had been to. The Orlesians start an armed conflict, I steal their stuff. It's only fair.
Loghain smiles inwardly at the memory.
Despite having travelled together since Montsimmard, he's not yet adjusted to her presence and the effect it has on him is both painfully familiar and strange at once. All these blurred distinctions between them, everything she has become. His memory seems unwilling to reach as far back as those days before he left Amaranthine and today Loghain is too tired for it anyway.
All he knows here and now is that it had seemed simpler then, perhaps because it was.
He had never expected to return.
"We're preparing for an unfathomable war," Elissa says; her face is turned away from him. He doesn't have to look at her to know that her gaze is as dark as her words. "Though it still appears to be far away."
"War often appears that way, regardless," he says, suddenly older than he cares to think about. "But in this case I believe you are right."
"We should make the most of the time we have then."
Loghain has been planning ahead for a while already, his mind willing and obedient in these matters no matter how tired his body is. You look to war for comfort, Maric had told him once, despairing. Loghain had protested – still protests at the memory – but it had been futile given the way his life had spun out. War is constant, he had told the king. Only fools and children believe it isn't.
"I agree," he says. "Preparation is a rare luxury."
Elissa makes a low grunt, an amused sound that cuts right through the direness of the conversation. When he looks at her he notices that she smiles; it is the first time he has seen her do so since he left Amaranthine many months ago and the sight of it lands somewhere in his chest.
"Only you would use a word like that when speaking of war," she says, her voice rendered soft by the lingering smile.
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The carriage moves even slower than time has during the past few months.
It seems like the snowed-in landscape – the reason they are travelling the short distance tucked into this means of transportation in the first place – is holding fast, resisting travellers and natives alike. As though the arling has closed itself around its own wrecked state. She wonders if the cold at least has frozen the straggling darkspawn hordes to death, if it has offered that small mercy.
Then again, Orlais has taught her that darkspawn – even the talking, plotting kind that makes her veins freeze in terror – are preferable if the alternative is Wardens turning on each other. Warriors, wardens, mages. All these sodding mages and their blood magic, like filth creeping under her skin.
She had arrived to a country that bore no signs of war, a nation as prosperous and magnificent as she remembered it. Only in the Order did she find a trail of that destruction that had wiped out Leonie's whole group of Wardens. Only underground, in the shadows, had she begun to make some sense of it all.
Perhaps sense is the wrong word, she thinks now, folding her sore arms across her chest and tipping her head back against the seat. There's little sense in bargains with the enemy; she would have thought hundreds of years filled with stories of wars being lost to ill-advised compromises or for that matter tales of mages being ensnared by demons had driven that point home. Apparently not. Even some of her own companions had thought the Architect made a good proposal, after all. That recollection is an angry flutter in her veins, a constant protest.
The conflict is settled for the moment at least – a brief, partial solution to a chaos that seems to be as wide and vast as Thedas and as erratic as all the mages in Tevinter. Elissa can't suppress a shudder at the thought.
The earth is rumbling, someone had told her. Something is coming.
It's already begun in the Free Marches, someone else echoes in her memory. The veil is being torn, the wounds are opening.
Unfathomable war, indeed.
It shames her to admit it even to herself, but one of the recurring threads running in her mind as they had fought their way across southern Orlais had been that she doesn't want to do it alone. This war, when it comes, it will wreck them all apart. Deep down that is her belief. It's a bone-hard and pitch-black conviction containing very little hope but she also knows that no matter the premises and regardless of the odds, she will stand ready when she has to, with an army at her back and a sword in her hand. This is what she does; she fights to the death.
War has branded itself into her life; it's her past and her future and a song in her blood. If she had ever hoped for a respite of the kind Alistair would always speak of – one day this will be over, he had told her over campfires and whispered to her in his tent and she had thought please don't make promises, please don't make promises, please until it hurt – she lost that last scrap of faith after the Blight.
It doesn't end. It shifts and alters and spins around but duty doesn't end.
She doesn't want to do it alone.
"I didn't risk too much," she says matter of factly, aware that it's glaringly obvious she has been turning this over in her head since he first accused her of it. She says it quietly, her voice a mere mutter. "I was very careful not to risk the Order. It was all sorted out. The only life I placed in any kind of danger by going inside that fort was my own."
"Yes," Loghain says pointedly, wearily.
"I thought you were dead."
"Then your strategy was all the more rash and foolish," Loghain retorts but his words lack the hard edges from before.
Exasperated, Elissa snorts as she glances sideways at him, looking at him properly for the first time in what seems like an eternity - or at the very least a lifetime. Being a Warden seems to do just that: age her several years in just a few months, causing unrest in her body. She wonders if it does the same to him. He sits up straight in the carriage, hands resting on his thighs, a posture of self-control and momentum. His face is just like she remembers it – neutral, stern, composed except for those precious moments when he slips and she sees through him; there are traces of Orlais there, making him look thinner and more worn, older. It causes a flurry of concern, sharp little twists and turns that make her throat tighten.
She's somewhat out of her depth here, still, but there's a new certainty between them now, a fixed mark of something – anything - deeply rooted in the tapestry of her mind. He's there. It's the sameness she longs for she thinks at times, the shared experience that breaches every difference and shapes a little world of its own, with its own set of borders. The gap between the man she knows and the life which has been mapped out for him intrigues her, at times because it mirrors her own life, at times because it absolutely does not.
There are no words to express that so instead she moves her hand over his, the thick leather of her gloves warm against the steel gauntlets he wears. They both look down and when she lifts her gaze upwards, Loghain meets it, holds it for a very long time as though he is looking for something.
"Tomorrow we can start setting our course for the near future," Elissa says, because it's always been an easy escape for both of them. Strategy. It holds back and contains and she loves it, helplessly.
He nods; her hand is still cupping his. "If the Vigil still stands."
The Vigil still stands.
As they approach, the massive sprawl of it against the sky seems almost excessive, like it has grown in their absence, its shadow hanging even darker over the arling it's built to protect. But Elissa finds that she likes it that way. Perhaps it's merely testament to the fact that she has been away for so long, but there's something grand about Amaranthine, something comfortingly stoic about a city that survives itself, time and time again. The Orlesians could not temper it, the darkspawn could not destroy it and every year the storms of the Waking Sea do their best to wreck the walls, but to no avail.
When the carriage stops on the grounds and she spots all the people who are waiting outside to greet them, Elissa allows herself to be swept away by a torrent of half-finished, exhausted thoughts all ending in an overwhelming sense of being home.
She looks at Loghain again and there's a hint of something similar in his face as he nods, briefly, and lets go of her hand.
The rest of the carriages come to halt around their own as Elissa takes a deep breath and steps out on the grounds of Vigil's keep for the first time in seven months.
Home, she thinks again. Such as it is.
If not for the welcoming party standing out here in the biting cold she would hardly remember the title she carries around these days, she realises as the guards and the servants greet her formally. Her past seems so distant, especially the slices of it she had never cared for in the first place. But here, in front of these people, she is the Arlessa of Amaranthine and the Commander of the Grey and she takes a deep, steadying breath as she steps into the formalities of her roles.
"These Wardens are new additions to our forces." She looks at the familiar faces, smiles briefly at Sigrun and Varel, the latter probably already counting the spare rooms in his head. "Most of them were stationed in Lydes, now they'll stay with us."
No one asks about the circumstances; there will be time for explanations tomorrow. Elissa turns to the group travelling with her.
"This is our keep." She gestures towards the grounds ahead of them. "Direct any practical matters to Seneschal Varel and any other questions to Nathaniel."
Nathaniel nods, curtly but with decidedly less vehemence than she can recall. She had suspected it would either do him good or break him once and for all to be left in charge and she looks at Varel who gives her a glance that tells her that she had been correct. It's good, this way he will be of use to her.
"Welcome to Amaranthine," she finishes, adding a smile for good measure though she feels more inclined to proceed inside and find somewhere to sit down for a very long time. "Come, don't let us linger in the cold."
A collective murmur rises from the wardens behind her and the ones in front of her, reminding her briefly of the way darkpawn sing in low, wordless sounds.
"Commander, it's good to see you," Varel says as they all make their way across the snowy courtyard. "We worried when we didn't receive any reports from Jader, but you changed your route, didn't you?"
Elissa glances over her shoulder at Loghain who walks a few steps behind her, seemingly in a discussion with Sigrun.
"I made some adjustments, yes." She frowns a little as she spots the beginning of a brand new building beside the barracks. "You made adjustments here as well, I see."
"It was my idea," Nathaniel says and there's that blend of defensiveness and irritation that she remembers, if slightly subdued these days. "The Vigil is home to Wardens, after all. The idea is that our numbers will grow, I take it?"
"Indeed. I'm certain you made good decisions. You can tell me all about it later."
He gives her a wary look of someone who is trying to determine the reason behind the words rather than the meaning of the words themselves. Relax, she thinks irritably in her head but she doesn't say it.
"Reconstruction aside, did anything important happen while I was away?" Elissa asks instead when they're inside the great hall, having escaped the cold at long last. Her eyes are on the fires burning in the fireplaces, wishing herself near one of them.
"Yes." Sigrun suddenly stands before them, hands on her hips. There's a new kind of seriousness at the bottom of her gaze – nothing worse than experience, Elissa hopes, a new life to drown out her old one – as their eyes meet for a moment. Beside her, Anders shifts uncomfortably. "Of course it did."
Elissa gives Loghain a hasty glance, before turning back to the dwarf.
"We can talk further once you have had a hot meal and some wine, Commander," Varel interrupts before she has time to ask Sigrun to elaborate. "For now, I believe we ought to welcome you home."
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A/N:The wiki tells me Varel dies defending the Keep. I had absolutely no memory of that from any playthrough so I decided it doesn't happen. Ignorance is bliss and all that. Besides, if Anders can survive despite, you know, dying, so can Varel.
