Chapter Six: Enough To Go By

Kathil:

Cullen started forward, then stopped. "Are you all right?"

He looked very odd out of his armor, in a shabby shirt and pants that were too short for him. He still held himself like a Templar, stiff shoulders and all, but without metal encasing him he looked almost lanky, like he hadn't yet quite finished growing into his ears. Kathil rubbed one tired hand across her eyes. "I'll live. And so will these two, if I have anything to say about it. Do you have any idea how many people are dead?"

Unreadable emotions flickered across Cullen's face. "We're going to be burying about thirty Templars, and I think about four mages died."

"Half of Greagoir's command. Dear Maker." She looked down at Lorn again, over at Zevran who was lying so still. Still breathing. Good. "I thought he was going to kill me, when he came in here."

She heard Cullen shuffle in place, then come forward. He sat down—not next to her, but nearby. "Something about not wanting to cause more trouble between the Chantry and the Crown than already exists. Kathil—" his voice was strained—"what happened? Not here, but before. When you were Fade-struck."

Oh. That. At least she owes him that explanation, since it was the thing that might get him executed (though why was he here if that was the case?) or at the very least thrown out on his ear. "Since the Archdemon…I've been wandering. Chasing rumors. Some of those rumors pulled me farther into the Fade than mortals are supposed to go. When I get very tired, I sometimes get lost. Someone was able to call me back. With…help. I don't know where that help came from."

(Though she suspected, and what she suspected made her very sad and afraid. Oh, Wynne.)

"And you made me defend you somehow?"

She did look at him now, and the raw wanting on his face made her flinch. If she'd somehow had him under control, she realized, Cullen's life could go back to normal. It wouldn't have been his fault that he had broken his orders.

But Templars are immune to some forms of magic, and she couldn't give him even that comfort. "I'm afraid that was you, Cullen. Control is blood magic, and I don't use it."

The want collapsed into disappointment. "Oh."

There Harrowing Chamber was silent then for a little, except for the rasp of Lorn's breathing. Kathil found herself bowing forward where she sat, memories of the first time she'd set foot in this chamber pressing down on her. To distract herself, she turned to Cullen again. "So why did Greagoir let you out, anyway?"

"He said that we needed all of the pairs of hands we could get." The templar's voice was sullen and bitter. "He didn't give me back my armor or sword, though."

"You do realize that being in that cell probably saved your life, right?" That brought Cullen's head up, and he stared at her. "They killed Templars for their armor. Probably drugged some of the water all of you drink. You probably would have been among them."

"I wish I had." Now the bitterness had fledged and taken on wings, and Cullen was staring at her. "Why did you come back?"

Why did you come, with all of this darkness and death following you? Why could you not leave us alone?

There was a laugh in her throat, and it was covered in blades. She swallowed it down. "Believe it or not, Cullen, I wanted to come home. I wanted to rest."

And instead I came here and Zevran followed me, and all this death on our heels. She didn't blame Zevran for following her—she had made a point of not releasing his oath, more or less demanding that he find her again someday. And he couldn't have known what she'd find on the old roads.

Couldn't have known that she spent as much time fighting half-seen shadows that followed her back from those roads as she did hunting down darkspawn cells. Couldn't have known that she feared she was becoming something—and she had no idea what.

Couldn't have known that she'd come back to the Tower in part because there was a strange comfort in the ceaseless watching of the Templars and the knowledge that their steel had been forged to drink the blood of mages.

She reached over to touch Zevran's blood-clumped hair. I am sorry, my friend, that I was not good enough to save you from this.

Cullen was staring again. "Is he your—leman?" She glanced at him, and this was obviously a question that had been bothering the Templar for some time, from the I want to know but I don't really want to know and why do I care anyway? look on his face.

"No," she replied. "Until he showed up here, I hadn't even seen him for a few years. He's oathbound to me, that's all."

"Why not?" Cullen asked, and then had the grace to look astonished at the audacity of his question. "I mean—it's obvious that you…like each other."

Kathil was too tired to guard her tongue. "Because Zevran doesn't let anyone get that close to him. He'll bed anyone who lets him, but love them? Maker forbid. Besides, when we were traveling together, there was someone else. Who did let me get close to him in the ways that mattered to me." Cullen looked like he was dying of curiosity, and was terrified to ask. "The King, Cullen. He wasn't the King then, just the Grey Warden Alistair, and he was sweet and shy and I pursued him like he was made of diamonds. By the time Zevran joined us, I was already involved with Alistair. I didn't give Zevran much of a second glance."

(But that wasn't quite true, because she had taken him into some very dark places with her and of all her companions it was him she turned to when her heart was despairing—knowing that Alistair and Wynne and Leliana and the rest needed her to be strong. Zevran could handle her fear and her hopelessness. His heart was surrounded by stone, and even she could not hurt it.)

"But…" Cullen seemed to be having a difficult time wrapping his head around the idea. "Alistair was a Templar."

"He never took his vows," she reminded him.

"He still had the training. How did you—he—"

She shook her head. "It helped that he hated being a Templar in the first place. He was never suited for it. As for how I managed to look past it—we do a lot of foolish things for love, Cullen. I went into it with my eyes open. I knew that if he became King, he and I wouldn't be able to be together."

("I can see parting from you becoming—difficult. I have to end this now, before I no longer can.")

That was ancient history, now, and the roads she has walked on since had made her so very tired. Cullen was still staring at her, tongue-tied. "I should stop talking about this. What do you think Greagoir is going to do with you, Cullen? I can probably work to have you reinstated properly—"

But Cullen was shaking his head. "He can't let me stay. I'll be leaving in a few days for Denerim."

"Denerim? Why?"

There is a look on the Templar's face that she couldn't name, but she knew it well. Knew it, because she'd worn that same expression once, the day over three years ago when her life changed utterly. The day she had found out Jowan was a blood mage. "I'm being sent to the Grey Wardens."

Her hands were numb and frozen. "But—"

Cullen shook his head, and there was the clatter of footsteps on the stairs, and within moments they were surrounded by mages and Templars who had bandages and healing poultices and litters to put Lorn and Zevran on and carry them down the stairs to the infirmary by the apprentice quarters. While they were being treated, and her own wounds were tended, she could not stop thinking about the look on Cullen's face.

I am so, so sorry.

Zevran:

Zevran was very good at many things. Pretending to be unconscious was one of them.

He had woken to a world of pain and familiar fingers on his head, a familiar voice speaking above him. He guessed that he was in fact still alive, that he had managed to cheat death at the dice game once more. He was about to open his eyes when he heard the half-stammered question, "Is he…your leman?"

There were some conversations that it would just not do to wake up during. Especially not when someone was talking about him. "—but love them? Maker forbid."

She'd meant the reply to be flip, but he knew her well, and he could hear the pain in that statement. As well, he could hear resignation when she spoke of Alistair. His Warden sounded exhausted, plain and simple, going beyond just the physical into some sort of weariness of the soul.

And then Cullen had said I'm being sent to the Grey Wardens and even when Kathil's reply was forestalled by the arrival of help, Zevran believed that that statement might have some implications for his Grey Warden that he did not enjoy thinking of.

He was finally able to let go of the pretense of unconsciousness when the mage who was treating him started checking his head to see if he had a cracked skull. "You're going to have to stay in bed for a few days," the woman said, frowning. He thought he remembered her name being Iselle. "What happened? You are a mess."

He smiled at the woman. "Ah, my dancing partner decided that it would be pleasant to spend some time carving pretty patterns into me. An artistic temperament, that one. Would you do me a favor, my beautiful spirit of mercy?"

The mage snorted gently, but the corners of her eyes crinkled, pleased. "What?"

"Tell whoever cleans that chamber that we will need the head of the one with the knives. The Grey Warden will need to spend a very specific message if we do not wish a repeat of this…incident."

Iselle paled and fled.

Eventually, the mages dispersed, blowing out most of the lanterns before they left. Zevran's wounds had been stitched closed and with magical encouragement would heal over the next few days, as would Lorn's. He'd overhead someone saying that Kathil was in better shape, and would be resting in her own bed. It felt startlingly familiar, like the nights in camp when they would settle in and tend their wounds in silence. All that was missing was Wynne.

Ah, Wynne. He did not know how she had helped him call his Grey Warden back from the Fade, but she had somehow. It was mage business, but business he was glad to have been a part of, even if he'd had to challenge the Knight Commander to obtain enough time to save her.

And because Zevran had managed to call Kathil back, she and Lorn had saved him in turn. He did not like thinking about that battle, and he soon would put that memory in the back of his mind, with everything else he preferred not to think of.

Footsteps sounded in the dim. He opened his eyes to see a figure bending over the bed where Lorn lay. "Good boy," Kathil said quietly, nearly whispering. "Such a good dog. You'll be all right. I promise." She knelt next to the bed, her robe rustling. He could hear the sound of her hand passing over Lorn's slick fur, and the warhound's heavy sigh.

"And you are not going to sigh over me and tell me what a good boy I am, lovely one?" he called.

She took a startled breath and got to her feet. "I thought you were asleep."

"With such a one in the room with me? Who could sleep?"

The Grey Warden laughed quietly and came over to his bed. Someone had left a chair by it, and she lowered herself down into it, movement slowed by pain. "I'll send the head and a strongly worded letter to the Crows tomorrow. I'll need your help with telling the messenger how to get it to them. Will that suffice, do you think?"

"It should." He had good sight in the dim; assassins were trained to be able to see by starlight and the leaked light from a shuttered lantern. Kathil looked weary, in some pain; her mouth was set in a firm line. "I could help you write the letter, if you like, but the fact that you will be sending the head of their best back to them will be most of the convincing you need."

She nodded, and even that small motion seemed to take much out of her. "What will you do now, Zevran? The Crows are probably going to let you be, from now on."

"Ah, but that depends on you, does it not?" He didn't know if she could properly see the smile on his lips, but he tried to make sure it was in his voice. "You still hold my oath."

"Oh. That." Kathil bent forward a little. "I don't think the oath is necessary any more. You probably have better things to be doing." Her voice was resigned, much as it had been resigned when she talked about Alistair. She expected him to leave, and to leave her behind. As everyone had except Lorn, whether it was by their will or no.

Until that moment, Zevran hadn't quite been aware that he was planning to do no such thing.

"Do not think you can be rid of me quite so easily, my little bird." He was watching her, and saw her head come up. "I have a feeling that you will still have need of me, in this new world you have built."

She was looking at him as if she couldn't decide what to think about that statement. "It doesn't really matter whatI need of you, Zevran. I've been doing all right without my assassin to call on."

He paused. "Have you? Have you truly, my Grey Warden?"

Kathil stared at him, opened her mouth, then shuddered and bowed her head. He was reminded of a night in the Dead Trenches. Your heart, Zevran. Surrounded by stone.

And yet she stood within the fortress, whether or not she knew.

"There is just enough room for two here," he said. "I promise, I do not have any designs on your body tonight, as beautiful as it is. But I think we could both use some comfort, no?"

She nodded wordlessly, and there followed some painful rearranging of limbs and resettling as it turned out that her shoulder was pressing far too hard against the deep design carved into his chest. She still smelled of starlight, with a tinge of the smell of an approaching lightning storm. Alien, yet familiar.

After a time, in the dim of the infirmary, Kathil began to speak. Her voice stuttered and stumbled as she told him of the bargain she'd struck with Morrigan before the battle with the Archdemon, her search for the witch after staying in Denerim had become too painful to bear. She told him of the old roads, the ancient presences she had struck bargains with, and the nightmares that followed her from those roads and back into the mortal world.

There had been battle after battle, and yet she had returned to the old roads. "There was little enough in the world to hold me here," she whispered. "Just Lorn, and the thought of how heartbroken he would be if I died. He's already lost his person once. How could I do that to him a second time?"

He knew where the new scars on her face and hands came from, now.

She told him of trying to find her family, of visiting Alistair. (Zevran tried to remind himself that she still had feelings for the lout of a King, and kept his mouth shut.) The offer he had made her—time with him on the road, but no acknowledgement of what was between them to anyone—it was a fool's bargain, she knew. Yet she had accepted. I was just so alone. It felt good that he wanted me, that he could offer even small crumbs to me. So stupid.

Then she began to speak of that last trip into the Fade—coming into the Tower, thinking herself safe at last, falling into an exhausted sleep and finding herself on the oldest of old roads. Her voice cracked as she told him about the Black City, its cracked and ruined stones, the howling that turned into a lullaby. "It offered everything that I want and can't have," she said, and her voice was raw with an edge of tears in it. "Rest and companionship, to make it so I cannot remember what I've lost. All of my weaknesses rubbed away. It lied to me, I knew it lied, and still I almost couldn't turn away."

"You are here and as far as I can tell, you are no demon," Zevran said. "So what happened?"

"I began to feel…someone touching my face. My hair. I heard someone calling me. Telling me that they needed me." She was warming in his arms, and from her voice, it sounded like she was blushing. "It, ah, sounded a lot like your voice. The power that carried it, though, that felt like Wynne."

He chuckled. "I was just thinking that it was odd, because I felt like Wynne was standing next to me, giving me orders like she always would after a battle. I thought it was something to do with being spitted on the Knight Commander's sword just after, however."

"I think Wynne…might still be out there, somewhere. Watching over us. I know it's a terrible thought, but it still feels…" She trailed off.

"Comforting. I know, little one. But to answer the question you did not ask, it was my voice. Something, perhaps Wynne's spirit, told me what to do." He hadn't intended to admit that, but perhaps it was excusable. It was very late and they were both wounded. "I needed you, yes, if only to stop your Knight Commander from killing the both of us and that foolish Templar and likely your warhound into the bargain."

Kathil shifted, just a little. "And now, Zevran? Do you still need me?"

He bent his head forward just a little, and smiled against her hair. "I am not going anywhere, my Grey Warden. We will see."

Soon after that, they both fell asleep, and when he woke at midmorning, she was already gone. But she returned that night, and each night after that.

He never answered her question. Not in words, at least.