Summary: He heals a wound left bleeding for years, and in return she reminds him that happiness, however fleeting, is always worthwhile.
Overall Rating for: Explicit scenes of an adult nature (aka Smut)
Overall Spoilers for: Human Noble Origin; The Stolen Throne (Novel); The Calling (Novel); DA:O plot before Lothering; Warden's Keep DLC information; Grey Warden information; Alistair's history
Other notes: Thanks as ever to Thessali for being a fantastic beta :D
This Chapter
Rated for: Not much
Spoilers for: The Stolen Throne (Novel); The Calling (Novel); Warden's Keep DLC information; Grey Warden information
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Duncan woke with an oath, trembling as he fought down the nightmare-induced nausea. Despite the emptiness of his stomach reminding him how long it had been since he'd eaten – anything, much less a 'proper' meal – he was glad enough for the dignity it allowed him to retain. Although he quickly realised Calla was no longer lying next to him…
"Nightmares?" There was a resignation to her question that made him wonder just how much supposedly 'secret' information about Grey Wardens she had read – and how, considering it was meant to be encrypted.
"Yes." He agreed, looking in the direction her voice had come from. The sun hadn't quite set, and there was enough ambient light to show that she had donned her armour. Two full waterskins dangled from one hand, and he gratefully accepted the one that she passed to him. "Any sign of pursuit?" He asked once he'd taken the edge off his thirst. The water was cold, and utterly unsatisfying as far as hunger went, but it crushed the remnants of his nausea, and his mouth no longer tingled with the phantom taste of darkspawn blood.
"No." She replied, continuing past him to the chests, where she began rummaging for something – food perhaps. "But then, this place is well known enough that no one would think to look for fugitives here."
"It is?" Duncan frowned, trying to think of any landmarks that he knew of to the south of Highever.
"You…don't know where we are?" Calla's surprise had more than a hint of amusement to it.
Duncan had the uneasy feeling that there was something about this situation he was missing, and that their location had a great deal to do with it. "I've never been here before." He hedged.
"Yes, but I thought all of Ferelden knew of this place." Yes, he was certain those were giggles he could hear her suppressing. "This," an ominous pause filled by more muffled sounds of amusement, "this is the infamous Trysting Tower."
Duncan allowed himself to sigh and massage the bridge of his nose briefly whilst Calla all but collapsed in laughter.
He'd heard of this place alright – as she'd said, it was infamous throughout Ferelden. Also popular enough with the nobility for any lowly soldiers to avoid it in fear of disturbing the wrong couple. "I…wasn't expecting it to be so much of a ruin." He admitted.
"Well, it's certainly seen better days." Calla agreed, patting the stones of the wall next to her almost fondly. Her expression looked slightly wistful, and Duncan fought down the twinge of jealousy that threatened to send some discontented noise rumbling from his throat. If he couldn't control that sort of reaction to the inference of past lovers – which he knew she'd had – then he didn't want to think what the consequences might be if he thought someone had looked at her 'wrong', or, Maker forbid, threatened or touched her.
The dangers of the Calling, coupled with this – whatever it was they had – seemed suddenly more real, not so easily dismissed. He remembered, so long ago it seemed now, how Bregan had spoken of the taint filling him up, leaving nothing but hatred, bitterness and regret. True, the circumstances then had been different, but Duncan could see, in his memories, how the taint had led to blind obsession. He knew what it had taken for Bregan to finally break free of the lies and darkness that had snared him…and he didn't know if he was strong enough to do the same. If it came to that.
"How much do you know about the Grey Wardens?" It wasn't the subtlest change of subject Duncan had ever managed, but Calla didn't call him on it. She was mostly hidden in the growing shadows, and as he began to dress, Duncan wasn't sure whether he was grateful or not for his inability to determine if she was watching him, or if the sensation of eyes staring at him was just his imagination.
"About the Wardens at the Keep – more than I ever wanted about their daily routines during peacetime." She laughed, and Duncan found himself smiling as well, all too able to imagine how boring a young – and rebellious – girl would find such accounts. "About Wardens in general…I…don't know." Her voice was hesitant, uncertain. "I mean," she hurried to explain, "I know some things, but some of the gaps I had to fill in myself so…I don't know if those bits are right."
Her admission came as something of a relief. For all her earlier assurances that the archives of Highever were well concealed, Duncan knew that was no guarantee they would remain hidden from everyone, forever, even if they weren't located by Howe or his men in the coming years. Something would need to be done about them, but for now the Blight was the priority.
"Tell me what you think you know about the Grey Wardens then." He told her, fastening the last of his belts and stretching to ensure that everything was secure and in the correct place before he added the rest of his upper armour and his weapons.
"Recruitment." Calla stated, her tone that of someone repeating their lesson back to a tutor. He could almost imagine her standing there, hands clasped behind her back, a look of concentration on her face… Resolutely he turned his mind back to the task of donning his armour.
"Grey Wardens accept volunteers at their discretion. They also possess the Right of Conscription, permitting them to recruit any individual, or individuals, of their choice, regardless of the social status, social standing or willingness of these individuals. The Right is rarely used, but remains a very real consideration in any recruitment situation, particularly when coupled with the implied forfeit any Grey Warden makes to properties and titles that they might otherwise be entitled to via the inheritance laws of the land." That was fairly comprehensive – Duncan was fairly sure that Alistair would have summarised it in rather fewer words, but then Calla was the daughter of a Teyrn, so it wasn't unexpected that she had considered the Right of Conscription in rather more political terms.
"Before a recruit becomes a Grey Warden, they undergo some sort of ritual or ceremony known as the Joining – I don't know what it entails, but…" there was a brief pause, and Duncan could almost see Calla steeling herself to finish her sentence. "The fatality rate is…high."
"You don't know, but you suspect." Duncan guessed. "What do you suspect it entails?"
Calla snorted. "When I was younger, before – well, when I was a bit more naïve – I used to imagine recruits battling darkspawn, or even dragons!" Her laugh was harsh, and Duncan wondered what she'd initially been going to say. Before…what? Before she'd been raped? "Then, several years ago now, Highever was hit by plague. I must have been one of the first to catch it, and when I recovered, the healer enlisted me as her helper, because she said I couldn't catch it again." A brief pause, accompanied by the faint sound of splint plates jostling one another, suggesting that she'd shrugged. "The villagers called the plague 'darkspawn sickness'. I asked the healer, and she told me about the sickness that can occur if darkspawn blood gets in your wounds, how it's black and acrid, like poison, and it slowly makes you one of them. Something no longer human." Another laugh, this one bitter. "I had a nightmare that night, woke myself and the rest of my family up with my screams. I remember clinging to my father, sobbing my heart out, really understanding for the first time why he thought so highly of the Grey Wardens who – except during a Blight – never seemed to sacrifice as much as the legends about them implied."
There was a long pause, a silence in which Duncan was acutely aware of the sound of his movements as he buckled on the last of his armour, stretched again to settle everything, and then picked up his weapons and fastened them into place.
"I have no idea if father knew – or suspected – about the Joining. Everyone assumed my nightmare was a delayed response to the suffering and death I'd seen as I'd helped the healer. So," Calla's voice brightened, full of a cheer that Duncan suspected was utterly false, "that's what I think the Joining entails. You poison yourselves with darkspawn blood to protect yourselves against their taint, but at the same time you condemn yourselves to it. I'd hope there are more benefits than that, personally, but since I should've died at least once since yesterday, I'm not really concerned if there aren't."
"Exactly how old were you, when you reached this conclusion – if you don't mind me asking?" Duncan enquired. True, as a child she'd been lucky – if that was the appropriate term – to stumble across the bits of information that coherently linked the pieces of her puzzle. But such things as survival of an illness aiding resistance to that illness thereafter were relatively common knowledge.
"Sixteen, nearly seventeen."
Maybe too common knowledge for anyone to readily put the two together, considering the leap of context. Not to mention, "how do you know the fatality rate is high?" Any Joining records should have been strictly encrypted.
"I didn't break the encryption, if that's what you're asking." Calla answered slowly, as if she'd heard his thought. "But the sheets were laid out exactly like the tithing lists the Banns submitted each year – names, locations, dates and tithe amounts. That's what I thought they were at first, some sort of supplies list. Only, the last column only ever had one of two entries – and why would something as innocuous as supplies be encrypted?" It was true, Duncan conceded, that the effort of encrypting and decrypting documents virtually guaranteed that anything that was encrypted was somehow important.
"I gave up trying to figure it out and went back to the journals – they were more interesting." Calla continued. "But the journals belonged to a senior warden, and there was one page that was just the same word, repeated over and over – 'why'. That wouldn't have made sense either, except he'd folded a separate sheet of paper into that page – there were, six or seven entries, I think. All of them had the same word in the last column. I remember at the time I thought maybe they were records of illness, of who'd survived and who hadn't. I suppose I was right, in a way."
"Well, you certainly know more about the Joining than any other recruit the Grey Wardens have had – that I'd wager on." Duncan muttered, not sure what he felt about her apparently calm acceptance that it might kill her. Then again, she was right in her assessment that coming with him had probably saved her life, and he'd seen the coldness in her, the steel that had let her walk away from her parents deaths with dry eyes and enough sense to get them both past Howe's cordon. "I must ask that you do not repeat what you know to the other recruits at Ostagar, however. It is not…customary, to forewarn candidates of exactly what the Joining entails."
"Of course," she murmured.
But there was no rancour in her tone, no suggestion that she felt it unfair on the other recruits. None that he could detect, anyway. "And what else do you know about being a Grey Warden?"
"During peacetime – boring as hell." Came her prompt, but cheerful response. "Recruitment, training, diplomacy, and the very occasional darkspawn raid that usually turns out to be someone mutilating their neighbour's livestock. During a Blight, fighting in addition to that – and dying as well I imagine...I've never heard of a Grey Warden killing the archdemon and walking away. Strange – you'd think someone would have managed an heroic survival…" Her voice was rather more subdued by the end than it had been at the start, softer as she pondered the vagaries of bardic ballads. "Assuming you don't die some other way, eventually you start having nightmares – again." Her voice sharpened, an edge that Duncan supposed was aimed at him, and his admission that he'd had a nightmare. "That's the Calling, and it summons an 'old' Grey Warden to Orzammar…to die in battle, I suppose."
Or slink away into the darkness to become a shadow of the very things they swore to fight, Duncan thought, reminded once more of the brothers – and sisters – he would join soon enough. The Architect's persuasive powers had been its most dangerous weapon, a weapon that had lured away more experienced Grey Wardens than Duncan himself. But then, he remembered with a slight smile – amused as much as bitter – he'd been a brash young rogue, an unwilling conscript equally unwilling to compromise. He hadn't been jaded enough by the harsh realities of life as a Grey Warden to let tales of overwhelming odds and inevitability make him truly consider the sacrifice that the Architect's plan demanded. He hadn't been Orlesian enough – much as Loghain Mac Tir might disagree – to go along with their plans for Ferelden. Or for Maric, the king who, somewhere along their suicidal quest, had become a friend.
"Since you already seem to know most of our secrets, I may as well correct your mistakes – and expand on some of your answers."
"Really?" Calla sounded surprised – though probably not as surprised as some of his fellow wardens were going to sound when they found out. Duncan outright grinned at some of the anticipated reactions his decision – already unconsciously made, but now consciously confirmed – would bring.
"Really?" Calla sounded surprised - though probably not as surprised as some of his fellow wardens were going to sound when they found out. Duncan outright grinned at some of the anticipated reactions his decision - already unconsciously made, but now bubbling to conscious awareness - would bring.
Potentially she had all the necessary skills. She had been trained to lead and manage - benefits he certainly hadn't had when he'd been thrown in at the deep end with the vague instructions to rebuild the order in Ferelden. As a Cousland she would undoubtedly know how to navigate Ferelden's political maze, and if her parting from her parents hadn't shown the steel in her spine, well, he didn't know what would.
The grin died, replaced by an anxious frown as he stared south towards Ostagar. The events of the future all hinged on what happened there, and whatever was going to happen, it was going to happen soon. They didn't have time for him to stand around stroking his ego and hatching plans that might never bear fruit.
After all, she still had to go through the Joining to become a Grey Warden, and even then - though she would interact with the other wardens somewhat beforehand - some unexpected snag might make itself known. Not that the wardens weren't, when all was said and done, as prone to human flaws as any other, untainted, human. But something - maybe the taint, maybe his years of seeing which recruits died, which merely survived, and which thrived - told him that his intuition about her potential was right.
He could see her, in the future, proud and commanding in gleaming plate armour, confidently continuing his work in rebuilding the Ferelden Grey Wardens...
That, in his hope or dream or vision, she looked uncannily like Genevieve, Duncan refused to contemplate.
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They travelled almost maddeningly slowly, but it was unavoidable. Though neither of them had mentioned it, they were still near enough to Highever Castle for Howe to have searchers out, who might spot them across the rolling plains of the Bannorn in the daylight. Since they were both wearing metal armour, the low angle of the sun at dawn and dusk, normally a boon to those wanting to move without being seen, added to the danger of reflected light catching an unfriendly eye. All of which meant they were restricted, for tonight and perhaps the next, depending on how far they managed to travel, to moving only whilst the sun was below the horizon.
The ground was flat enough, but it seemed their path led through this year's fallow pasture, and the long grasses were wild and tangled. It made for slow walking if they were to avoid sprained ankles and broken legs. Even worse, the night was overcast – though not, thankfully, wet – and the clouds not only obscured what little moonlight they might have been able to see by, but the stars that were their only navigational aid in the darkness.
For all Duncan could tell, they might have become completely turned around and be heading north. Except with two of them, and neither of them having fallen – yet – that was less likely. Not impossible, no, but they were more likely to drift either east or west of directly south, and that wouldn't be so bad. They would lose time, but they'd already gained time over anyone travelling on the roads.
A heavy sigh to his side drew Duncan's attention in Calla's direction. She was difficult to pick out in the darkness, the deep brown of the scale armour's leather making her pale face seem to float, ghostlike, in the night. His own, pale armour, Duncan thought with a sudden burst of amusement, stood out in a similar way, whilst his dark complexion and hair blended into the darkness. Anyone seeing them approaching would probably run in terror, thinking he was the ghostly body that the disembodied head floating to the side belonged to.
"Are you alright?" He murmured after Calla sighed again.
"I'm just wondering how to tell Fergus what's happened." She replied, voice glum. "He's not going to take it well." Ah. Duncan remained silent, not quite sure what to say. "If it was just our parents…it would be bad, but…I think he'd listen to reason, go after Howe sensibly. But –" her voice dropped to a near whisper, "how am I supposed to stop him doing something stupid when he learns his wife and son are dead too? Even if he never learns how they died, he…" She choked, and her voice trailed away.
"Will we arrive at Ostagar before him?"
Calla gave a snort of laughter, the noise surprisingly loud in the quiet of the night – Duncan heard her stumble as she startled herself.
"No. The men Fergus is with are scouts – skirmishers. If I know my brother, they've taken this route as well – they'll be travelling as quickly as they can, expecting to make Howe and his men seem even slower." Her voice turned sour at the mention of Howe. "Fergus will make it to Ostagar, of that I'm certain – Howe wouldn't have expected him to travel across country, and the storm yesterday will have covered his tracks as well as ours. The Orlesians had more chance of catching the rebel army than Howe ever had of intercepting my brother and his men." Her contempt for the arl was evident. "But if Fergus survives Ostagar," she continued, clearly thinking aloud, "then Howe's treachery has all been for nothing, and surely the king wouldn't let such a thing go unpunished?"
"Do not forget, my lady, you are also still alive." Duncan reminded her, not quite offering her a way out, but aware that she almost certainly knew the reason for the downfall of Warden's Keep, and the precedent that it set.
"But I'm only a woman." She retorted. "I'd cease to be a Cousland as soon as I married, and I couldn't have a legitimate heir without marrying." She sighed. "And marriage is what I'd all but be forced into, if I wanted to retain control of Highever in any way, shape or form. Besides, your agreement with my father was that I would become a Grey Warden." Her tone had become bitter, and Duncan wondered if she was really as sanguine about becoming a Grey Warden as she had seemed earlier.
"Only in return for ensuring your escape from the castle," he corrected, "and more credit for that feat is yours than mine."
"I'd rather die trying to become a Grey Warden than spend the rest of my life as broodmare to some nobleman whose first act on picking up a sword would be to stab himself in the foot!" Calla snapped, stopping in her tracks and turning to face him.
Duncan paused, and found himself straining to control two conflicting reactions – neither of which were appropriate, both of which stemmed from the dark surge of his taint. The first, stemming from the images that had sprung to mind as she referred to herself as a 'broodmare', was arousal, a reaction that he pushed to one side of his mind along with the furious jealousy that accompanied it at the idea of someone else touching her. The second, a visceral response to her angry outburst, was the urge to strike her, to bring the back of his hand across her face – an action that would certainly cause his gauntlets to draw blood.
He would act on neither, he told himself firmly.
Carefully he tugged off one gauntlet and reached out, pressing his palm to her cheek, defying the urges in the back of his mind. She leaned into the touch with a sigh that fluttered across the heel of his hand.
"Believe me, I didn't mean to infer that I don't want you to be a warden." A part of Duncan knew that his statement was an utter lie, but it also knew that determination such as hers would not be swayed, knew that such determination was what the wardens needed.
She turned her head slightly, brushing a kiss against his palm before she drew away from him. "I know – I shouldn't have snapped. It's not you I'm angry at. Sorry."
"Then," Duncan started, pulling his gauntlet back on and indicating they should begin walking again, "let me fill you in on what you're determined to get yourself into."
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AN: My take on the inheritance/power structure of Ferelden is that it is very strongly male dominated. Even if it is accepted that women can lead in their own right (whether as Queen, Teyrna, Arlessa, Bann etc.), it doesn't strike me, in most cases, that they do so. For example, Loghain names himself 'regent' even though Anora is around 30 years old and has ruled alongside Cailan for the past 5 years. Given that example, I think under different circumstances (ie. no Blight), if a fem!Cousland was left as the sole Cousland, she would be under incredible pressure to make a political marriage (whether of her own volition or at the Crown's 'request'). If she refused, that pressure might then turn on the Crown to strip her of the title of Teyrna and 'reward' another arl or bann. It's this political pressure that Calla is angry at.
In this fic I don't see Duncan as having 'rubbed shoulders' with the nobility enough to be fully aware of what her position would be in the above case – he's mostly viewed Ferelden politics from a distance and, or from the viewpoint of any political impact on the Grey Wardens.
