It shouldn't have been this way — that was what Hamish thought as he knelt by the corpse. He knew it was a corpse, too — knew it instinctively before he got to it, even though it was the first he'd seen outside of a sick room. When you needed to learn healing you needed to deal with sick people, and some of them died. Death was never orderly, or neat, or easy, but in the Tower it had been… much easier than this.

The Healer and The Champion had been firm about this. When people died, they weren't allowed to disappear, they weren't allowed to blame it on casualties of war and vanish — it was desperately important that they not appear to be emotionless and unsympathetic, and even if it meant they were attacked by grieving families asking why it would always be them who tried to make up for the damage they caused. The propaganda that the Chantry spread was too dangerous to the cause, and it had to be countered.

The boy.…the boy was no more than ten.

When his mother came, running and screaming from one of the few houses not destroyed by stray fireballs, he quailed and got to his feet. She shouted at him. To save the boy, to do something that could not be done, not even with magic, and when he stumbled out a few words of sorrow he found himself suddenly set upon with flailing fists, scraping nails and screams of outrage.

"You did this! You mages and your stupid rebellion! Why couldn't you just stay in your towers where you couldn't hurt anyone? Why are you here? My son! You murdered my son!"

He should defend himself, but he couldn't. There were ways to stop her onslaught, magical ones, physical ones, but he couldn't, she was right, anyway, they'd already hurt her as badly as they could, and if he attacked her he'd just be as bad as she said he was.

You are as bad as she says you are.

The biting, scratching and hitting went on for an indeterminate time, before it was suddenly stilled. The woman was lifted from his unprotesting, punished body by a strong hand and he felt the tingle of soothing magic with that distinctive flavour that was unique to the Healer. The woman's sobs were quieted and she was gently lowered to rest against the ruins of a stone wall and the Healer turned to him, still curled in a ball on the ground.

"Are you all right?" the Healer asked.

"No," he replied dully, not bothering to look up at the man who was crouching next to him, loose limbed and relaxed, as though he wasn't the cause of so much death and destruction.

The Healer.

Maker's Breath, who had come up with that name for him?

The Healer let out a long breath. "We have to get moving," he said. "There's nothing more we can do for the people here. The damage has been done."

His lip curled. "We won though, didn't we?" he said, shifting up from the dirt he was lying in to stop the blood from his nose running into his eyes. The woman had done some real damage, he realised then, and by the way the Healer's eyes narrowed he could see it plainly.

Magic was called forth again. He considered flinching away and not allowing the Healer to fix him — some sort of penance for what they had done to the woman's son and the others he knew would be fueling pyres that evening, but…

…they wouldn't know. And it hurt. So he turned his face and let the Healer's magic knit skin back together.

"The cost today was too high," the Healer muttered as he worked. "Our information was faulty. That templar patrol was supposed to be transporting mages, not fortifying a town. We were stupid to attack. We should have withdrawn."

"You mean you were stupid."

The Healer sat back on his heels, firelight playing across his cheek and hair. Fires that they had set, that mages were helping to extinguish. There were large streaks of grey in that hair that hadn't been there when Hamish had first joined the cause. "Yes," he said.

"Nice to know our leaders are as fallible as the rest of us."

The Healer raised an eyebrow, then got to his feet. "Sorry to disappoint," he said.

Hamish scrambled up beside him, anger roiling in his gut. "How do you justify this?" he demanded.

"Are you truly asking me that?" the healer said, looking at him sidelong.

"You killed so many, back in Kirkwall. And now, every day, every time we come out to attack, people die who would otherwise have lived. Is it true what they say, that you think mages are worth more than ordinary people? Does one of them dying not matter as much as one of us?"

The Healer started walking towards a group of mages who were helping a farmer round up his scattered livestock. The animals were panicked by the proximity of fire, running in circles, bleating and screaming. Mages plunged after them almost comically, trying to deal with things most of them had never encountered before. How many of them had even seen a goat, before the rebellion? "You went to the Tower late, didn't you?"

"I was ten."

"I was twelve. I lived with… normal people before that. I spent more time out of the Tower than most. Normal people hid me from templars. Normal people came to me for healing, let me deliver their children." He stopped and turned, and his face was hard. "That boy back there… in a year, two, his mother could have been screaming at a templar who'd come to take him away. Do you think she'd be any less virulent then?"

Hamish stopped, remembering his own parents. The shocked silence. The blank looks. The Healer was looking at him, with eyes narrowed.

He swallowed.

The Healer nodded. "That's why we're doing this, Hamish," the Healer sucked at his teeth and turned, sending a wave of magic towards a bolting goat, halting it in its tracks so one of the other mages could wrangle it back towards the makeshift corral they'd made. The farmer seemed grateful, even smiling a bit at the mages who were helping him. He hadn't lost too much.

Hamish couldn't resist looking back towards the woman, who had managed to crawl to the body of her son. His head was cradled in her lap and hers was bent down over the still body, thin shoulders shaking.

"We don't know he would have been a mage."

"We don't know he wouldn't have been," the Healer replied. "But that's not the point. Everyone is hurt by the way things are now. Everyone. Not just mages. No one should be thought of as a thing or a problem to be dealt with. No one should be relieved to have their child taken from them, because they don't have the skills to deal with…" The Healer sighed and rubbed sweat from his forehead. "But you've heard all of this before." The Healer followed Hamish's gaze towards the woman on the ground, and there was pain in his eyes, and determination in the set of his jaw. "It's only because we have to see what it costs that it hurts so much."

The last of the animals was herded back into place, and the mages who were healing the injured started to filter back to the meeting point. The dead templars would be given a pyre of their own,and a service. Once the mages were gone, no doubt the Chantry sisters would come out of hiding and minister to the village, and they would probably preach about the evils of the mages who brought this on them, and some of the village, the woman, Hamish was sure, would listen and her resentment would build and she'd teach it to her remaining children…

….and if one of those children turned out to be a mage he or she would be halfway to loathing themselves the way the templars always wanted them to. They might even choose tranquility over a Harrowing, because it would stop the pain of being something their own mother hated, or turn to blood magic or…

"What if it never ends?" he blurted out. "The war? The deaths? Every day more people… I can't… I don't know if I can… This isn't what I wanted when we left, I wanted to be free not… " more trapped than ever.

The Healer's nostrils flared and Hamish took a step back. He had never seen… that part of the Healer. Not even in battle. The rumours were that it only happened when The Champion was threatened.

There was an echo of the fade in his voice when he answered, an eerie sound that sent a chill into Hamish's bones. "What would be worse, is if we'd never tried."

The Healer turned then, and started shouting orders to the mages to get back to their base, and Hamish watched, swallowing hard and clutching at his staff.

As they left the woman looked up from her weeping and caught Hamish's eyes with her own.

He shuddered, but kept walking.