Loghain's tent was significantly larger than the others in the encampment, though still a fraction of the size of the tent he had occupied at Ostagar, room within to stand, to turn round, rather than just a cover to keep the rain off while sleeping. She wondered just how he fitted it into the small space in the Feddicks' wagon that they had bargained with the merchants for, to use for carrying heavier goods when they moved from place to place. A bedroll occupied about a third of the space, roughly treated furs unrolled on a mattress of pine boughs that pleasantly scented the air, a small chest doubled as a table with two maps spread out on it. She remembered his surprise when she had given him those - odd that they should share this liking for old maps and charts. For her they had always been magical as a child, the world condensed to a sheet of vellum, a glimpse through the eyes of a soaring bird. She wondered what they had meant to him.
Loghain had turned to the table and adjusted the wick of the small oil lamp there, bathing the tent in a soft glow. He tossed towards her the roll of furs that clearly served him as a pillow with a terse "Here, sit on those", then turned away, rummaging in a bag to produce a horn comb. She flinched at the sight of it. Alistair had combed her hair at night in her tent, it had become a prelude to making love, his gentle touch easing out the tangles and dust of a day's journey.
Loghain was regarding her quizzically and she flushed, telling herself that the bitter erotic images in her mind could not possibly be visible to this other man.
"You might want to take off your shirt." His voice held a little humour in it, clearly he had seen her blush.
"My shirt?" There was a quiver in her voice
He gestured impatiently with the comb. "If you have never had short hair, then you perhaps wouldn't know that a haircut leaves little bits of hair everywhere. You will still be shaking them out of your shirt a week from now if you leave it on. You have got an undergarment to preserve your modesty, I assume?"
Damn him, damn him, damn him. This is a purely practical exercise. There is no person in this camp who has not seen me in a breastband when we strip to wash at a pond in a hurry on the road, and that includes him. I am not going to blush like a naughty child who Nan has just caught stealing raspberries from the kitchen garden.
She unbuttoned the heavy linen shirt she wore, noting mechanically that there was yet another tear in the sleeve that would need to be mended in the morning, folded it carefully and put it aside. Loghain had taken a sewing kit from the same bag and extracted a small pair of shears from it. He put them beside the comb on the chest, then offered her back the dagger he had taken from her. "Daggers are fine for cutting hair if you have nothing else to use. Save that perfect edge for a darkspawn throat, Warden."
"What did you use on your own hair?"
"My razor. Easier than shears when you cannot see what you're doing, just pull the hair up and slice." His words were wry. "Of course if you really make a mess of the job, you then have the option just to shave the whole lot and start again. But the weather is a little cold for that."
"Am I allowed to have second thoughts about this?"
"No. I did say that was the hazard when cutting your own hair and unable to see what you were doing. If I had left you to your own devices with this dagger, it might have been a very real prospect."
She accepted the blade, setting it aside with her discarded shirt, then began to fumble with the cord binding up her hair with fingers that seemed cold and clumsy, unwilling to obey the commands of her brain. He stopped her, laying a hand on her bare shoulder, warm and strangely comforting. "This is my tent. Outside these walls, the decisions are yours still, unless you choose to give them up. In here, I make the decisions. If you don't want that, simply stand up and leave, I won't stop you. If you choose to stay, then just sit, and for once let the choices be someone else's."
Someone else to make the decisions, even for a night, was a luxury she had not had since Ostagar. She let her hands drop, quiescent, into her lap. With her eyes half closed, she could feel Loghain unbinding her hair, letting the pale tangles fall almost to her waist, then tugging the horn comb through them. He was not gentle, but it didn't hurt, she could feel his hand at her nape taking the tugs of the comb before they reached her scalp.
"Who had long hair, that you used to comb for them?" she asked?
"Anora, as a child. Hers curled as much as yours does. That is the main reason she wears it as tight braids, now she is grown. She hated her nurse trying to comb it, and used to run to me to do it."
He paused and traced the line of a recent scar with his finger, that started at her collar bone and sliced obliquely down her right arm "And that is a scar that you thoroughly deserved. Attacking an armored man frontally from his strong side, and neglecting to keep your own guard up, while wearing only leathers. If you had been a fraction slower on your feet, I would have ended the duel with that one stroke."
"I know." Her own hand drifted up to touch the scar. "The only reason I escaped a three hour lecture from Wynne about it later, was that she wasn't actually speaking to me at the time because I had let you live."
Amazingly he chuckled, a rough sound, as though his throat was unaccustomed to laughter. Probably it was. "So I was of service to you already? I would imagine it takes rather a lot to keep that mage from giving her opinion to all and sundry, whether asked or unasked"
He ran the comb once more through her hair, satisfying himself that the knots were gone, then picked up the shears. A couple of snips, and she watched a long waving tress of fair hair slip down her shoulder and fall to the floor, followed by another. He saw the direction of her gaze and tilted her chin up. "Don't look down at it. It isn't important. Not any more"
Odd words, but she took his advice, staring instead across the tent at the closed flap while he worked. Shadows crossed the firelight that shone under the flap - Shale, making a check of the camp, judging by the heavy footfalls. Wolf was barking in the distance - not darkspawn, that was more excitement than warning. He'd probably found another rabbit.
"Did you know that I once talked to your father, about the possibility of marrying you, when you reached a suitable age?" Loghain spoke by her left shoulder, tilting her head with one hand while he trimmed around her ear. Just as well - if he hadn't been holding her still, she would probably have jumped a foot in the air and lost part of said ear.
"No, I didn't know". And no, Maker, I am not blushing again. Please, please don't let Father have told him...
"I had been very uncertain about asking him. Politically, the match was excellent, a union of the two great teyrnirs. Your brother and his wife already had a son, there would be no issues about inheritance, but a close political binding through marriage would have been a force to reckon with in the Landsmeet. And already there were questions about my daughter's ability to bear a child - if we had had children, they would have had a strong claim to the throne if Cailan and Anora remained childless. Little as Eamon would have liked the idea. But I had doubts."
He was suddenly in front of her, regarding her with a slight frown, making another tiny snip near her ear and then moving to the right side of her head. "My doubts were personal, not political. I was far older than you, married before, with a grown daughter. You were young, intelligent, lovely, with a bevy of suitors snapping at your heels like eager mabari puppies. I doubted very much that your father would agree to it, or indeed that you would consider it even if he did - it was well known that your father had already stated he would not compel you to a match when you were old enough, if the match was not to your liking. When I said that to Bryce, he seemed very amused. He said that given your fascination with the stories of Maric's rebellion, and the pictures on the walls of your room, he very much doubted you would disagree when the time came to ask you."
Father told him...
Suddenly the tent was very close with the flap closed, the oil lamp giving a lot of heat in the confined space. Of course that had to be the only reason why she felt hot.
He trimmed the remaining hair around her nape, then took the comb again and ran it through her clipped locks. "There, it's done." He turned away to put the comb and scissors in the bag.
Cautiously, she put a hand up to touch her head. He had cropped her hair to roughly two inches long, the remaining curls made about a turn and a half around her finger. Her head felt strange, light, without the weight of the hair. "How bad does it look?" She deliberately made her voice almost teasing, not quite a request for reassurance.
"Fishing for compliments?" His voice was amused. "Most people would say it suited you, madam. But see for yourself" He had his shaving mirror in his hand as he turned back to her. She took the mirror and studied it carefully. Her face looked boyish with the halo of short curls, her eyes huge and dark in the dim light - for the first time she actually saw the resemblance to her brother, which everyone had commented on when she was young. Fergus... suddenly there were tears in her eyes, and she was furiously blinking them away.
"Muirnara?" Loghain sounded surprised. "Do you hate it that much? It is only hair, it grows back. If we live to see past the Blight, then you can let it grow to your waist again. It is not a mutilation"
"It's not that." Angrily she rubbed the tears from her face. "I was thinking about my brother. He wore his hair like this when we were both children."
Loghain took the mirror away from her and set it on the table. When he turned back to her, she was already on her feet. He started to reach a hand towards her, then stopped. "Win or lose this war, Warden," his voice emphasised her title, "the world will not be the same. The empty spaces at the table will mock with their gaps, holding the ghosts of those who should have sat there. All that we can do, is conduct ourselves in such a manner that we do not dishonour those who have not lived to see it end. And many would say that I was the last man alive with the right to say any of that to you."
She caught her breath at that. He nodded at her surprise. "Many would blame me for everything that led us here. I did not know of Howe's intentions towards your family, but that did not stop me still using Howe as a tool for my hand when I needed him, despite what he had done. I allowed Tevinter slavers into Denerim's alienage, in the knowledge that we had not the money to fight the war I saw coming, nor the means to evacuate or defend the Alienage if the war came to Denerim's gates. A hard choice, and an unjustifiable one, at a time when there was no good choice. And then Ostagar..."
"West Hill, " she said. He stared at her.
"You saw the parallel?"
"Yes. The promise that Maric exacted from you, never again to leave men to die, for the sake of one man. I know why you made that choice, not to commit men to a battle already lost, when we were far too late with the beacon."
"I did not expect you to understand that." She had indeed surprised him. "I have made mistakes, more than my lot, some of them monumental. All I hope for is that the chance to redeem at least some of them is given to me before I die. And if you can make an end to this, Warden, I will follow you. I swear it."
I am not going to start crying again. I will not. I will not.
She was shaking again, almost uncontrollably. He took hold of her shoulders and eased her down to sit on the edge of the bedroll, dropping her discarded shirt over her shoulders. "Stay there, you're shivering. I will clear this up and go and rebuild the fire outside, before we get some well meaning interruption from the Antivan elf or the Orlesian bard wondering where you are or why the fire has died." She watched him pick up the shorn hair from the floor and push his way out of the tent.
When he returned, he came back to sit beside her on the bedroll. She tensed, but he did nothing. He studied her for a moment, then reached out and stroked her cropped hair with a gentle hand, an oddly impersonal caress. No words, just a warm hand smoothing her short curls back from her face, down the back of her head, running lightly over the nape of her neck, over and over again, as he might have soothed a frightened horse or a Mabari that had come to lay its head beside him, seeking comfort. There came a point where she relaxed with a sigh, moving slightly towards him, and he guided her head onto his shoulder, gathering her into the crook of his arm. She closed her eyes.
"You have been alone too long," he said quietly, still stroking her hair. "Not alone physically, you have friends here. But how long since there was someone else who took any of the burdens from you? Who was not looking to you constantly to make the next hard decision, plan the next strategy, work out the new battle plan?"
"Ostagar." She whispered the single word answer, her eyes still closed.
He nodded. "Too long. It isn't a good thing. All my worst mistakes were made when I believed the weight of a nation was on my shoulders, and my shoulders alone. With less reason than you for believing myself alone. Tonight, you are not alone. And the decisions are not yours to make." She tensed, his hand soothed her again. "Tonight you are safe."
Safety. A word that she had not heard for a long time, nor dared to even think about.
"Sleep here tonight. Just sleep. There are only a few hours left to dawn, I have no plans to try to go back to the nightmare I woke from this morning, and I have some writing to do, so the bed is free. I sit by the door, nothing will come in here without coming through me first."
He had moved away from her as he spoke. She looked for a second as though she was about to bolt, then with a sigh she drew her legs up and curled onto her side. He dropped another fur over her, and sat down beside the chest, drawing some papers and a pen from his bag.
"And tomorrow," he added, glancing over at her, "I will see you down at the sparring ground near the river, and I will teach you the counter for the blow that nearly killed you. You will not be relying on reflexes and luck if you end up in that position again."
She nodded silently and closed her eyes again. The scratching of his quill pen blended into the crackle of the fire outside, the bed smelt of pine, and a little of smoke from the curing process they used on wolf furs, and also elusively of something else. While still trying to identify it, she drifted off to sleep. And mercifully, that night, no dreams came.
Author's note
Some of the inspiration for this chapter came from watching the film of the Bourne Identity again. You know the scene where Matt Damon cuts Franka Potente's hair? One of the most charged love scenes in any film - and something about the half light in that scene made me suddenly see this in a tent, especially since I realised my Cousland character bears quite a strong resemblence to Franka. But I couldn't see Alistair as the male protagonist, so I put the idea on the back burner for a long time, until I read Persephone Chiara's amazing story The Edge of the Grey Enigma which also has a haircutting scene, and suddenly I realised that the other character just had to be Loghain Mac Tir. Once I saw that, the rest of the chapter just...came.