Skin and Sun

34 Dragon

Vinmark Mountains

Somewhere in the Vinmark Mountains, Hawke threw her bedroll to the ground in disgust. "I hate this Maker-damned place," she said, weariness radiating through her sun-burnt face. She turned to Fenris's bemused face.

There had only been a few weeks of discomfort between them. Fenris had turned the corner off the Hightown street that led only to the Rose. Not looking up, he had turned right into Hawke. Her lips had thinned, and she'd averted her eyes in hurt. Fenris had felt that he must, this one time, speak. He'd caught her elbow, and she neither turned away nor flinched.

"I am no cook," he'd said.

"If you can read, you can cook," Hawke said, repeating the rebuttal he'd often heard her mother offer her a thousand times. Then she'd blushed and looked at him with a hint of their earlier honesty. "Sorry."

He'd kept her gaze. "I prefer the Rose's stew to the Hanged Man's. There is no other enticement."

That was as close to a conversation on the topic as they'd gotten. The next night, he arrived at her estate in time for the evening meal, as he had often done in the past. Not one of Hawke's dependents commented on his absence or his returned presence. They ate, and then Hawke and Fenris retreated to the library. They spent their free evenings sitting so near each other that their upper arms brushed every time one reached to turn a page. Each brush of skin caused some inner beast to stir. He watched it stir. Some nights, when the wine was particularly good, or when he'd drank just the right about of it, he'd brush his lips over her fingers or, once, her cheek when they parted.

In short, they continued as they'd begun, but now Hawke hinted at nothing. He missed her hints, but he found he preferred the looks of tentative hope that sometimes softened her face. He was a fool, he knew.

At this moment, thought, there was nothing tentative about the expression of loathing on her fine-boned face.

"How has the climate wronged you now?"

Amusement flickered briefly. "I'm hot, I'm about to be cold, and my waterskin leaked onto my bedroll, so it's soaked and I have nothing to drink. I hate the desert."

This was, Fenris knew, no desert. A desert was hotter, drier, colder, and barer. In a desert, a man would kill for one of the sticks Merrill was loading into Carver's outstretched arms. Fenris passed her his own waterskin, still half-full. She sipped carefully and passed it back.

"Thanks."

"You are welcome." He knew his pleasantries were too formal, but they made her smile, so he persisted, even after hearing Isabella and Anders aping them to each other. He found a cathartic pleasure in willingly addressing her in the manner which he had once been forced to use with his master and his master's friends.

Hawke sighed and sat on her pack, resting head in hands and elbows on knees. She looked small and a little sad, and, as always, her vulnerability made him feel somehow exposed. The beast stretched. He kept his distance and his silence until it went back to sleep.

"Are you well?" he asked.

"Besides being hot and damp and about to be cold and damp?" She shrugged. "Alright."

He nodded and turned to attend to his own camp chores. He ought to have expected it. The Hawkes were both remarkably impervious to all they had learned of their father in the last ... however long it had been. He had stopped counting their breaks some time ago. From a flicker of Hawke's eye, he suspected that she had already known. He remembered what Anders had once said to him: to use blood magic, you had to look a demon in the eye and accept his offer.

He also remembered her telling Anders once that he reminded her of her father.

He glanced back at Hawke, who was inspecting her waterskin minutely, looking for the defect. Of her, he had experienced only a moment of discomfort. He had told himself that it had been her good training that made her magic safe. She had made him come to believe that there were some mages – at least one mage – that, properly trained, could live away from the circle. Under supervision. That she could, he was confident. He had seen her turn down demons and spirits alike. If her father and teacher had made deals with demons, there was no sense to it.

Fenris was not shook because he doubted Hawke. He was shook because he wanted nothing more than a new set of rules by which he could order his ideas, but everywhere he looked, there was chaos and contradiction.

The witch and the templar returned. Merrill was explaining how to start a fire without a flint.

"You don't just magic it?" the besotted man asked her.

Carver irritated him. What kind of templar blushingly asked a known blood mage – one who admitted to dealing with demons – for a drink at the Hanged Man? What kind of order wouldn't care if she had said yes and they'd been seen there together?

"We would need a short bow," Merrill said.

"We have one!" Carver exclaimed, and he fell to his skirted knees to dig one of the more worthless bows from their loot. Fenris glanced Hawke's way as he opened his mouth to protest. She shook her head, thin-lipped.

Carver found it, rose, and crossed again to Merrill, who was digging a groove into a flat piece of wood with the same knife that she used to slice her palm open. Carver knelt and watched her work.

"Thank you for showing me this," he said.

"It is a pleasure to share my people's knowledge," Merrill said. Carver beamed. She glanced at the bow in his hand. "Oh. That's Hawke's. Hawke, can we use this?"

"What makes it hers?" Carver asked, with his familiar edge of rivalry.

"Hawke is our leader," Merrill said.

Carver snorted.

"Go right ahead," Hawke said.

"It's no more hers than mine," Carver argued, but not even Merrill was listening.

Fenris stood, discomforted. He wanted distance. He wanted to not hear the witch's cloying blindness or Carver yip at Hawke. He wanted the solitary ramble of his own thoughts. Besides, they had not brought enough wood, and the sun would sink quickly. Freed from the weight of his pack, he covered the ground in long strong steps. This was not the desert, but Hawke was right when she complained that there was not a full hour of the day in which the temperature was pleasant. That portion of an hour was here, and Fenris enjoyed the cooling air on his still-warm skin. He had not gone more than twenty paces when he realized that he wanted to be free of Hawke as well. He had not gone fifty when he realized why. It was dark when he came back.

Fenris woke, the lyrium in his skin tugging at him. He sat up, looking about. Hawke was by the fire, coddling a small flame in her hands. Her borrowed bedroll – he could not tell if it was Merrill's or Carver's – was thinner than the one she usually used. Her bedroll was laid open by the fire, drying. The third was empty. Carver's, Fenris assumed, abandoned to keep the witch company. He was, at least, persistent.

He sat up. As the blanket fell, he realized that it was cold. Hawke, catching the movement in her peripheral vision, closed her fist around the tiny fireball in her hand. Fenris felt her mana wink out.

"Sorry," she said.

"It is no trouble."

Hawke pulled the blanket more tightly around her. The sky was a swirling mass of stars above them, the heat of the day rushing towards them. Fenris reached for the pile of wood and added another branch. It was so dry that it caught immediately.

"Carver will be tired tomorrow," he observed, dryly.

"We'll be in Kirkwall by the afternoon."

"Where he will have to hate mages again."

She smirked at him, the fire twinkling over her face. "We're hard to hate."

Fenris felt the corner of his mouth turn. "Is that why you brought them, then?"

"I asked him because they attacked him in his bed."

Fenris shifted. His bedroll was caught uncomfortably around him middle. He pulled it loose. "Come here, Hawke," he ordered, without looking at her. "Bring your blankets."

She got up and moved to him, but she did not sit down until Fenris took her hand and tugged her into his lap. As she sank towards him, he wrapped his blanket around them both. She curled into herself, and he tucked her head under his chin. She felt good there, right.

Grief, unbidden and un-understood, rose again. He watched it awhile, felt it shift and swirl with Hawke's breath.

"You don't want to know why I asked you to come?"

The fear flexed it claws, like a tiger. "Tell me then," he said, with forced lightness.

"I like your company best," she said, sounding pleased.

That was, Fenris thought, good to hear, even if he had already known it. Of the many things about Hawke that he was sure of, her loyalty was one. He had watched, alarmed but not surprised, as she brushed off the flirtations of others: Anders, then Isabella. It was around then that he'd caught them aping him, he remembered with satisfaction. He had come to her home more often after that, stayed later. Every time he knocked, she smiled and held her door open.

It seemed she could take the uncertainty of the future with patience.

"I have found another thing to admire about you, Hawke." He had spoken almost faster than he had thought, but he knew what he was going to say, and so he said it: "You do not fear the past."

She tried to move to face him.

"Humour me, and be still."

Obediently, she went very still. "Why fear it?"

"All men fear the things they do not know."

"I am not afraid of you."

"You are a fool." She knew nothing of the grief that broke him in the night, of the fear that clawed at him. She knew nothing of Tevinter or the things Tevinter took from its slaves, and he did not want her to ever know.

"I am not a fool." Hawke pulled against his embrace again, and he let her free. She twisted in his lap so she was facing him, her hand on his chest above his heart. Her mouth was so close to his that all he would have to do is lean forward. "Do not flinch," she said. He could feel her lips moving, they were were so close. He froze, waiting for the kiss. He owed it to her to accept it.

She did not move forward. He watched the fire flicker over her face in the cool high air. There was no passion in her face, just that tentative hope that soothed him. He leaned, and he touched his mouth very carefully to hers. The beast raised its head, and its gaze stopped him from tightening his arms, from leaning further. From arranging her legs on either side of him. He would not be unmanned before her again.

She did not deepen their light kiss. He hated and was grateful for her carefulness.

"I will keep you warm, if you like."

"Please," she said. He slid her down, arranged her body between his body and the fire. She warmed and softened and slept, and he breathed her in. When Merrill woke him for his watch, her bedroll was dry, and he draped it carefully over her.