Chapter Two:

He found the cat a week later.

It was a cool, grey, rainy day, a bad time for business. Raindrops splashed into puddles. Anders covered his head with his cloak as he walked back from the marketplace. It was a new route, one he had not taken before and one which allowed him to shelter as much as possible under shop awnings. Anders liked to take a different path home every time, even if it meant walking further. Being aware of all potential escape routes at all times was just another one of his precautions.

He was nearly back to his stall when he heard a faint miaow.

Anders paused to look around. Rain dripped from the hood of his cloak. He liked cats, considering them kindred spirits. They'd had cats in the Tower, because even the Templars couldn't prevent cats from going wherever they wanted. It was a mystery to Anders why cats wanted to be inside the Tower, where the mice were fiercer than any other rodents in Ferelden, but he had always been grateful that they were.

There was no sign of any cat. Anders looked around, scanning every potential window-sill and rooftop for a feline form. He saw nothing. He was just about to continue on when he heard the miaow again. It was very faint, and it seemed to be drifting from the floor.

Anders knelt down to squint beneath an abandoned vegetable-barrow. "Puss?"

There was no reply. Anders' glasses fell off and landed in the mud. He picked them up hastily, folding the frames and tucking them into the pocket of his ridiculous coat."Puss?"

A weak snarl answered him. Anders stood up and gently pushed the cart away. A small tabby cat lay in the dirt, limp as the remains of last week's vegetables that surrounded her. She didn't even have the strength to flee. Pupils dilated into black holes, she snarled again as Anders knelt down and petted her head, ruffling damp fur through his long ring-studded fingers. Her tail hung limp, legs trailing. Anders touched one pink-padded paw and was rewarded with a flurry of feline expletives.

She could still feel, then. It was a good sign. There were some injuries that even healing magic could not repair.

Anders didn't even consider the consequences as he reached out for the Veil. He felt healing magic gather in his palms as he focused his thoughts. The cat hissed again. Her fur trembled with static. She shuddered and went limp as a current of mana flowed from the Veil into Anders and coursed through his hands into the cat's small broken body. He spent a few minutes carefully mapping her injuries until he could picture the shattered bones as clearly as the pasteboard images on his cards.

The damage was worse than Anders had expected. He stroked the cat's bloodstained fur gently, salving bruised muscles and knitting broken bones together. It was an exhausting process. He had never worked healing magic on anything so badly damaged. The cat was nearly dead, her tiny spirit seconds from fleeing to the Fade. Anders had expected that healing an animal would be much easier than healing a human, but he'd been wrong about that too. The cat's muscles didn't fit into the places he was used to. The body shape was all wrong, flattened on a vertical axis rather than horizontal. And then there was the tail, and he really had no clue at all how that worked.

He tried anyway.

At last it was done. Anders collapsed on his back in the mud, one flung arm over his face. The air smelt of cabbage and rain. He didn't particularly want to move. His muscles felt like lengths of knotted rope, and like a rope, he knew he couldn't stand without support. He couldn't even raise a hand to wipe the raindrops from his nose.

As the Veil receded he became aware of a heavy weight balanced in the centre of his chest. He swiped hair from his face and stared into wide green eyes.

"Hello," he said.

The cat purred. Anders reached up to tickle her chin. She tilted her head back to allow him better access and regarded him smugly as he stroked her wedge-shaped head. He smoothed his hand down her damp spine and heard footsteps squelching in the mud behind him.

Anders dislodged the cat unceremoniously into the street. She yowled as he sat up quickly, head spinning. His hood fell wetly back and through the rain he saw a small girl peering at him over a pile of crates. She saw him staring, gasped, and vanished between two buildings in a flash of yellow skirts.

By the time Anders had struggled to his feet the girl was long gone. He made a desultory attempt to search for her, but she had vanished into the dusty maze of alleys around the market place, and there was no knowing which way she might have gone. Yellow clothing was in fashion this year. Anders knew that he would be able to find any number of small girls in yellow skirts around the town, no doubt guarded by protective fathers who would take a dim view of any raggedy hedge wizard enquiring about their daughters' whereabouts.

The cat rubbed itself against Anders' leg and purred. Anders, surrendering to the inevitable, picked her up and took her home.

His life returned to what he had begun to think of as normal.

He woke at dawn every morning, drew his shop curtain back when the big clock in the marketplace struck eight and worked until dusk. Sometimes he would spend the evening in the tavern, or go for a walk, or listen to a poet or storyteller. More often he would return to his shop, where he practised magic surreptitiously behind the curtain while the cat watched and cleaned her coat.

It was a pleasant routine, if undemanding. Anders found that it suited him much better than the strict timetable he had become accustomed to in the Circle Tower. When he bought his dinner, he could eat chicken, or vegetables, or fish, or any combination of the three. He could drink water, or wine, or strong local cider from Easthill's apple orchards. He could skip dinner altogether and wander out into the countryside, or go to a tavern and listen to a fiddle player. People, he was beginning to discover, often did such things.

Best of all, Anders had the weekends off. He had ceased to wonder what people did with such vast oceans of free time. He often wandered deep into the countryside, searching for remote places where he could practice magic in peace. Sometimes the cat would accompany him. Sometimes she stayed behind and slept on Anders' bedroll at his stall, where she shed hairs onto his pallet and vomited the less digestible parts of small rodents into his boots.

Anders' quiet idyll lasted for nearly a month.

And then everything changed.

It was the middle of the night. Anders was woken from a deep and dreamless sleep by the sound of someone knocking, no, he realised as he blinked sleep from his eyes, hammering on the doorframe.

His first thought was Templars, but Templars rarely bothered to warn mages of their presence. He threw of the covers, shrugged on his clothes, and picked up the knife he kept beside his pallet and which, he realised with mounting panic, he had no idea how to use. Carefully, blade at the ready, he drew the curtain.

At first he thought that the street outside was empty. As he adjusted his gaze downwards in response to a sniff he saw a small girl in a yellow skirt, wiping her nose with one hand and hanging onto Anders' doorframe with the other. She gasped as she saw him, and took a step back, but she did not run away. Anders immediately concealed his knife in the folds of his long coat. He knelt down instinctively, bringing his eyes onto a level something more closely approaching the girl's face.

"Hello," he said gently.

The girl removed her hand from her nose and wiped it on her skirt. "Are you a good mage or a bad mage?" she asked. "I have to know."

Anders felt a slow spiral of terror trace its way up his spine. "I'm not a mage," he said hastily. "This fortune-telling business, it's-"

She swung on the doorframe. "I saw you with the cat."

Every instinct Anders had screamed at him to run. "What cat?" he asked casually just as the cat herself poked her head out from behind Anders' curtain and proved him a liar.

The child pointed. "That cat. She was hurt. I saw it. And you healed her." She hesitated appeared to come to a conclusion. "I guess that makes you a good mage. That means you have to help." She sniffed again. "It doesn't matter. You've got to help. You're the only one I can ask."

Anders bit back the retort that he didn't have to do anything. "Help what?" He looked at the child more closely and rephrased his question. "Help who?"

She sniffed and wiped her nose.

"Does someone need healing?"

The girl nodded. Tears leaked from her eyelids. Her eyes were swollen from crying.

"Just let me get some things." Anders pushed back behind the curtain. The instinct that had him tipping herbs and potions into a leather satchel had absolutely nothing to do with magic. Easthill was a small town, and it had no healer save the Chantry and a midwife. There was likely nobody but Anders who could help the child. He was a healer, after all.

The child hung on the curtain and watched Anders gather his things. The cat settled herself in the warm, Anders'-shaped space on his pallet, her tail curled like a question mark. When Anders had everything he thought he would need and a few things he hoped that he wouldn't, he drew the curtain back across the doorway and turned to the girl. "Where are we going?"

"Home," she said, leading Anders across the marketplace with a ferocious silence that would have seemed unnerving in any adult. Anders followed, matching his long stride to her short one. The small town's streets were very quiet. A sickle moon rode high in the sky and cast their paired shadows on the earth with a light so bright a man could have read a book by it.

The girl tugged Anders across the market square and down a maze of alleyways with her hand twisted tightly in his long coat. When they had left the outskirts of the town behind, she stopped and pointed at a small and shuttered house.

"That one?" Anders asked.

The girl nodded.

Anders steeled himself and knocked, tapping his rings gently on the peeling paint. It crossed his mind, as he waited for a reply, that this might be a trap, and then dismissed the idea as preposterous. Surely no family would send their little girl to fetch a mage?

He was still debating the issue when the door opened a fraction. The face that peered through the crack was both worried and hostile. It looked Anders up and down and said "What do you want?" in a tone that was obviously unimpressed.

Anders nodded at the girl. "I'm told you need a healer," he said.

The woman inside hissed a curse at him and opened the door just wide enough to beckon the girl inside. "Temar, what are you doing?" She hushed the girl's whispered protests and turned back to Anders, shaking her head in denial. "I don't-"

There was a shout from the back room of the house, followed by a sob. The woman turned away, her hand to her mouth as if she was choking back a cry, and forgot Anders for a moment. The child Temar reached out and took Anders' hand, her chubby child's fingers folding neatly into his much larger palm. She tugged him into the room, past the bemused woman and through the next door into the back room.

A small but not particularly surprising tableau faced him. A man knelt beside a low bed with his arm wrapped tightly around the tense shoulders of a small girl. He looked both frightened and confused. The child's face was slack, unconscious perhaps, but in all other aspects a near-exact copy of the girl who had led Anders inside.

"Temar, who is this?" snapped the man. He was shorter than Anders, thickset, with a mulish face that was so similar to both children that he could only be their father. The girl sobbed, flew to her sister's side and threw her arms around her, burrowing into her father's armpit like a rabbit.

The man turned to Anders, fists bunching despite his kneeling position. "Who are you?"

Anders stepped back, half-turning as the woman who had opened the front door came up behind him with her hands on her hips and a glare that was more intimidating than her husband's. He held up both his hands to them. "I'm a healer," he said, pointing to his satchel. "Let me help you. I have potions."

The pair exchanged a look that said that Anders couldn't possibly make the situation any worse. The father rose from the bed, his lips tight, and prised Temar from her sister's still form. "D' you want paying?" he asked gruffly as he cradled his daughter on his hip. "We haven't got much money, and-"

"It doesn't matter," the woman put in sharply. She reached out for Temar as the man crossed the room and cradled her daughter's head closely. "We'll find the money. Just save her."

The man's face creased with misery. He opened his mouth as if to speak, then shook his head and reached out to clasp his wife's shoulders. It was not a good sign.

Anders slid the satchel from his shoulder and approached the bed. He'd gotten quite skilled in the use of healing herbs over the years, because a man who had cured the infection that would have left your baby son blinded or wife dead in childbirth was a man who you were that much more likely to assist. One glance at the girl was enough to know that no herbs he had would be sufficient. The child was fever-hot under his hands. Red spots marked her skin like a crimson leopard's pelt. As Anders watched she went into a convulsion, arched her back and bit her tongue so hard that blood trickled from the corners of her mouth.

The girl's seizure appeared to make up her father's mind for him. "Can you cure her?" he asked desperately, hope tingeing his voice.

Anders truly didn't know. Spotted fever was often deadly in a child as young and as obviously sick as this one was, but he wasn't about to tell her worried parents that."Take your other daughter away," he told them as he put his satchel down. "I need space to work."

The mother took Temar from her father and carried the weeping girl into the front room. Anders hardly registered their exit. He pushed up the sleeves of his coat, gritted his teeth and reached out for the Veil.

The rush of power was far stronger than he had experienced before. Anders, well schooled, abruptly stopped seeing the girl under his hands as a patient and visualised her instead as a problem about to be solved. The arrangement of bones and muscles was familiar, but this healing would not be as simple as pushing shattered bones into place. Infections had to be purged from the body meticulously until no trace remained. Once that part of the healing was complete, the damage the infection had caused to the patient then had to be repaired, inch by painstaking inch. Finally, he had to strengthen the girl just enough that she didn't immediately fall prey to another infection, but not so much that her body began to consume itself in a vain quest for fuel.

Anders flexed his fingers, touching pulse-points, and began. At first he concentrated on the child's lungs, frail sponges wrapped with tissue thin as cobweb and twined with a network of crimson vessels. He worked methodically, purging every airspace and lobe until both the child's lungs were clean. Next he soothed her body's response to the infection, cooling her fever as he did so and returning her body to some semblance of normality. Finally, he eliminated every telltale spot from her skin.

The next part was harder. Anders reached out to the Fade for more power, siphoning magic into the child like a conduit. Her cheeks flushed with health and her brittle hair turned sleek strand by strand. Anders' hands burned. His muscles ached as if he had just run a race. He pulled back, gasping and hoping that he'd done enough. The girl took a deep, ragged breath. Her cheeks hollowed. Her chest heaved.

Anders dragged mana from the very depths of his soul. The child drank it down as easily as if she was gulping water from a cup. He could see that she was almost healed, so nearly safe, but he was exhausted. It felt as if he'd pulled his patient from a lake, only for his strength to fail an arms-width from the shore.

Let me help-

The voice was friendly and kind as old First Enchanter Irving. Anders shook his head. He poured what little power he had left into the healing and cast until his hands smarted.

I can heal her, the voice offered. All you have to do is call me from the Fade-

Anders ignored it. He concentrated on the child, watching as she strengthened with every spark of magic that he summoned.

I can-

Anders pulled back from the Fade with smarting hands. The voices stopped as suddenly as if the demon had been gagged. The child coughed and began to cry. Anders scrutinised her squalling face for signs of illness, but he saw none. He stepped back hastily as the girl struggled to sit up, calling for her mother, and caught the table behind him with his heel. As he did so his knees gave way and he collapsed onto it, hands dangling between his legs, too drained to speak.

The woman dashed into the room. When she saw her daughter sitting up she hurried forwards and fell to her knees beside the bed. The father watched them with a dreadful hope. Anders rubbed his forehead between thumb and forefinger. He could have used a healing himself, but he truly didn't have the energy. "It's done," he said.

"I told you!" Temar said excitedly from the doorway. "I said he'd help."

The woman stroked her daughter's hair and looked up at Anders. "Was that magic?" she asked, a little fearfully.

Anders lowered his hand from his forehead. "Well it wasn't herbs and leeches, if that's what you mean." He looked at the healthy child and reasoned that it did no harm to remind the family what they owed him. "Either way, your daughter's better."

The woman flew forwards and hugged Anders. He found the gesture awkward rather than reassuring. Ten years in the Tower had made him uneasy with personal contact. He bent awkwardly over her shoulder and realised that the light that glinted through the oiled-cloth window was already rosy. Just how long, he wondered, had it taken him to heal the girl?

It felt like an age to Anders until the woman released him, but it couldn't have been more than a few moments. She gazed at Anders like he was a miracle sent from the goddess herself. "May Andraste bless you!" she said.

Anders rubbed his eyes again. "I think that's very unlikely."

The woman ignored him. "Thank you," she said. "What can I get you? Do you accept payment?" She dug into the pockets of her apron. "Money? Goods?"

Anders shook his head. He steepled his fingers against his forehead to forestall the splitting headache that he knew would follow. He knew it was foolish to pass up a chance for cash, but right now he was too tired to care. "Maybe a bed for the night and some food, that's all."

"You can sleep here," the husband said instantly. He looked around the small two-room cottage, hospitality warring with practicality. Hospitality won out. "We don't have much room-"

"We have a hayloft," the woman said, "That is, if you're not too proud-"

Anders, drained to the bone, was too exhausted to refuse even a stall in their stable."Thanks," he said. "That would be most generous of you."

"Andraste's grace brought you to us," she said. "We won't turn you away. And we won't bother you for healing arts again."

They kept their word, but news spread. The old woman down the road hired Anders to cure her rheumatism two days later, and the butcher paid him to staunch the blood pouring from a cut finger the day after that. After that Anders had two or three patients every day waiting at his shop curtain. He knew that he should have left long before, but it was nice to be needed.

Anders stayed.