034 – Memory
When Kiran was thirteen, he thought he was living the worst year of his life. But thirteen was followed by fourteen, which was followed by fifteen, each more terrible than the last.
The low point of every year was the Landsmeet, when the Couslands shut up their estate in Highever and the entire household made the journey to Denerim. Despite the Cailan's obsession with pleasuring himself and Anora's desire for international recognition, the capital of Ferelden was a filthy, stinking city. The streets were strewn with garbage and feces, which flowed freely from the narrow streets of the slums onto the main thoroughfares, like smaller tributaries joining with a great river. In Kiran's memories, the city folk were thin as shadows, despairing, hollow-eyed ghosts, and the courtiers were vain and vapid, though still as treacherous as the reefs that hid in opaque, shallow waters.
Sometimes he wondered how such worthless people could haunt his memories so thoroughly, making him flinch with raw, visceral embarrassment in the middle of dinner, or as he climbed a set of winding stairs, or when he was thrown breathless onto his back during a sparring match. At the oddest moments, he remembered stuttering and stumbling through conversations and court dances with faceless Ferelden girls as his palms grew sweaty and his tongue tangled around his teeth and the only way he could keep the words coming was to drink more and more unwatered wine. He remembered being pulled into a drafty alcove hidden behind a faded tapestry, and another tongue twining with his, rancid and slimy and bitter—or maybe that was the taste of his vomit coming up, splattering across the cold stone and the hem of Habren's embroidered gown.
He remembered having his broadsword, still too heavy for his bony wrists, knocked out of his hand by a knight who rudely kept his visor down during the post-match formalities. He remembered King Cailan's remarks to Bryce Cousland that "his youngest son had not his father's skill with a blade", for they were loud enough to carry over the snickers and whispers of the entire court.
And afterwards, he remembered being taken aside by a dark skinned man in a Grey Warden tunic, who introduced him to the basics of fighting with one long dagger in each hand.