X
The Deep Roads seems familiar to him every time he descends underground, and they are all the more frightening for it. Because the familiar things are darkness and whispers and flickering shadows, and sometimes when they make camp and he glances away from the tiny fire, he shudders. The darkness of the Deep Roads is dense and sticky, like mud or tar, it clings to the mind and to the soul and it is difficult to shake it off, to wash it away. All too similar to the darkness he carries within, in the memories of his past.
"Cold?" lady Cousland asks, stopping beside him, briefly touching her hand to his to check if it is warm, as if he was a child. Her gesture is just a reflex, a habit, but there is something moving about it, something that touches him to the core. It is normal, usual, a gesture she would offer any other of her Wardens. And, given to him, it means acceptance, it means he is one of them, fully, because even if they do not know of his past, she does.
He cannot help smiling at her, hesitantly, gratefully. In the dim light, against the background of stone and shadows, she seems like a snowflake, soft and light, just a whisper. "No, my lady. It's just the Deep Roads, I guess."
She nods, pensively. "They're... Well, deep is the proper word to describe them."
"Aye, that it is." He watches her as she stares at the dark entrance to yet another tunnel. "Aren't you afraid, my lady? Of what you might find down here?"
"I've found many things down here. I'd never wanted to even know that some of them existed. Most of them." Her face remains calm, but something flares in her eyes, and her smile is frightening. "But the most frightening things I've seen are not darkspawn but what you can find in people, in the deep roads of the heart." The smile is gone from her face and her eyes go frozen, with a sadness trapped within, some deep sorrow he cannot even name. And then with a shock he realises it is pity, and that she maybe does not even realise how strongly she feels for him because sympathy comes natural to her, and it is like a blow to the guts, and he lets out a choked breath. She looks at him, then, and her face softens. "You would know, Thom Rainier, wouldn't you?" she asks quietly, but each word is crystal clear and stabs like a well aimed dagger.
"Yes," he answers curtly, his voice hoarse with guilt and remorse and self-loathing.
Her sigh is like a tired breath. "I know, too," she mutters. "But I also know that some roads lead up, and there is a way out at the end of some tunnels."
He does not answer because he does not know what to say, and can only stare in shock at that woman who knows both so much and little about him, who knows all about him and speaks his deepest fears and most timid yet most ardent hopes as if they were her own. And he swears, through the darkness but not to the darkness, he swears to that light that is somewhere there at the end of the tunnel, he swears all over again that he will shield her and protect her, and even die for her if need be, because of the way her words resound in his heart and make him hurt but also make him alive.
. . .
By the time they returned from the expedition, Rainier was barely lucid, and it was nothing short of miracle that he somehow managed to get back to the Keep mostly on his own feet. The wound has him half conscious and abed; some new vile poison the darkspawn have found somewhere in the depths. Velanna works her magic, and the wound heals, but the fever holds on.
Wounds are nothing new for him, and over time, he took many wounds for her. One that had him limping for a fortnight, another, when he almost lost an eye, many, many more. He does his job, like they Wardens all do, protecting one another without hesitation, but he is different in that. Gives himself wholly into that, making that a sole purpose of his life for a moment. Sometimes, when she notices the look on his face as he charges the enemy, she thinks that it might be his sole purpose, and that should fill her with gladness, she used to think it would feels her with gladness, but it turns out that all it leaves her with is the ashen aftertaste of sadness and pity.
She sits beside him sometimes, thinking, watching. In this fight with death, he seems almost passive, very mellow. He is just as mellow when he talks to her, she realises, too exhausted to even feel dread at the discovery.
He moves, parched lips muttering something. "Mockingbird, mockingbird..." It sounds like a song, and with morbid curiosity she listens for more.
If he died, it would be an easy escape for the man he used to be. If he died, it would not be fair on the man he is now. So either way, he does not deserve to die; not that way, at least, not like this; a swift death in battle, if anything.
She leans over him, brushes damp hair off his sweaty forehead because she is learning how to take gratitude, and it seems that sometimes gratitude smells of illness and sweat and feels sticky at her fingertips.
"Don't die, Thom Rainier," she whispers, her voice going that too-soft note over his name, again. She does no longer have to guard herself not too speak his name too harshly because that soft way of speaking it is a habit now. "Stand up and breathe." And, a little shocked, she realises that is what she wishes on him. That she wants to see him breathe again, not only in the literal meaning of the word. That she wants to see his burden lifted.
It is not the same; similar, but not the same, and whatever happens now will not take back her past, nor his. But there is... There is that tentative feeling whispering at the back of her mind and lodged in her chest, burning like the fever which is holding him in its clutches, the feeling she has tried so hard to decipher and the only explanation she can find is: meaning.
No matter what she has done, nothing can undo the past, save Highever as it had been, save her parents; death, no matter what, always is and will always be just death, and nothing can make it better. But she had a choice, and she could either forget Highever and let everything go to waste, or hold it up in her memory and give it meaning. And, her head spinning from that fever that is not fever at all, hands trembling as she puts the pieces together in her thoughts, it dawns on her that maybe it is the same for him, because he could have left the bodies and carried on as he had been, making those deaths just another ones in a record of meaningless memories, like Rendon Howe had done, or he could look at his sword and his hands and understand, and he did, and once he stopped running he changed his life. And it does not right the past, does not undo those deaths, but somehow in a weird and twisted but not a wrong way it gives them significance. It is not only about the memories one carries, but also where one carries them.
And, for some reasons which she cannot name, it is important. Nothing has been able to mend what had been broken in the past, and this will not mend that either. But, feeling his forehead burn with fever under her palm, she suddenly realises that for some reason it is very important to her to know that for every Rendon Howe, there may be a Thom Rainier.
And she realises – she, who wished death on him – that she does not want him to die. And there can be no clearer sign than this quiet change of her so reluctant heart.
"Breathe, Thom Rainier," she whispers, her fingers smoothing over the scar on his shoulder. "Stand up and breathe."