Chapter Thirty-Six: And Fools Rush In

The sun came back eventually and as grateful as Eliante Cousland was to turn her face towards it warmth once again, the elves freed from the commandeered Tevinter slaver ship's hold treated the rays with such joy that it was as though the Maker's face itself was shining down upon them from the sky.

It was a favorable day as they came up the coast toward Alamar, warm enough for late in the month of Guardian that Eliante peeled off her boots and lay flat on the deck, eyes closed against the sun on her face, enjoying the simple rocking back and forth as the stolen ship crested each wave. My spring, she thought, sleepy in the sunlight. My summer.

After much discussion with the stolen hahren of the Highever alienage, it had been determined that the elves could not return to Highever nor to Ferelden, not presently. Malcolm's originally heading of Brandel's Reach had not been a waste; it had been determined that the town of Alamar, famed for its independence from much of Ferelden's politics, would make for the best temporary home for the freed elves. And they were free; Eliante and Nathaniel and the rebels had managed to save them –not all, but, from the looks of the kept records in the captain's cabin, most. Not a bad week, she thought as the sails flapped loudly above her in the wind and she smiled because it was her father's phrase.

Not a bad day, he would say, kicking off his boots in his study after a day's work hunting down bandits with Fergus and Gilmore. Not a bad month, he would remark with a slight grin to Eliante's mother after Fergus and Oriana's marriage when the newlyweds would appear late to breakfast every morning, alternately blushing, grinning, and smirking. Not a bad year, he had said, coming in through their Denerim estate's doorway, brushing snow from his shoulders, the Satinalia before last, the last Satinalia he saw.

By contrast, this year had been a very bad year for the Cousland family. But this week, Eliante reflected, this week hadn't been so bad. They had driven the magister out of Highever, taken one albeit crippled ship and rescued the elves trapped within. They had even found documents stating exactly how many elves had been taken out of the alienage before their interference. They found nothing directly implicating Rendon Howe unfortunately, but still; Not a bad week.

Of course, there were variable opinions on that statement.

Some distance away, Adrian Tabris was sitting against the mast, perched upon coils of rope, the thick vellum of a single, specific page of the Tevinter slavers' records crunched into a ball and nestled in his lap. He had been carrying that page everywhere with him, it seemed like, yet when asked about it, the elf had looked down at his hand to find it tight between his fingers, as though the discovery of it shocked him every time. And if Katriel had seemed quiet before the raid, her twin was all but mute.

There were exceptions to his silence though, such as now. Katriel approached him with an offered plate of salted fish and hard tack that they had recovered from the galley below. He accepted the offered meal and quietly said without preamble: "You told me not to hope."

The young woman paused, clearly checking herself as Eliante cracked one eye open to watch the Tabris twins through her peripheral vision. "I did," she agreed, equally subdued in volume.

Adrian sighed and tipped his dark head against the mast behind him. Eliante noted once again how different the twins were in coloring, Adrian dark and auburn-haired and Katriel all pale and fair. Brown eyes closed, Adrian commented, "It didn't help."

"When does it ever?" she said frankly and continued on her way.

But Katriel said a lot of things, some answers freely given, others somewhat coerced. The moment the rain had lightened and Malcolm Dryden had steered the ship to ride on smoother water, Nathaniel had sat the young elven woman down upon a bench on the top deck next to the steering wheel and had asked, "Who in Thedas is Fenris?"

Clearly annoyed at his uncompromising approach, Katriel, her pale blonde hair still slicked with rainwater despite the tarp her brother had rigged from one side of the deck up to the rear mast and over onto the other side to provide some shelter from the elements, had flicked her green eyes sideways and sighed. "I don't know," she replied crossly. "If you want me to recite his family name, his character, his past, I can't do that. I don't know most of it, just about any of it." She paused. "And I don't think he does either."

"I suppose he didn't want you finding him after he bedded you," Malcolm had called from his post at the wheel. "Was his performance really that lackluster?"

Almost instantly, a thin knife with a dark wood hilt engraved with mother of pearl had embedded itself deeply into the cog of the ship's wheel just inches above Malcolm's left hand. Eliante had looked in surprise to where Katriel still sat stiffly on the bench and then to where Adrian stood a little ways off, motionless. He had not moved to defend his twin's "honor," so to speak; he had clearly understood that she could protect herself.

Casually, Malcolm had pried the pretty knife loose from the wood and examined not the ornate hilt, but the blade itself. "Tevinter steel," he had declared. "He give this to you?"

"Yes," Katriel had barely inclined her head in a nod. "Just before he left on the third day."

"Three days," he had marveled. "Lad must have had some stamina."

"Oh, he did."

"Enough!" Eliante had finally exclaimed. Looking to Katriel, she had said, "You're worse than Anders and," she had looked back to Malcolm who had raised an eyebrow at her, "another Anders. Katriel, please. Was he the source of your information about the slavers in the alienage? Did he tell you anything else?"

"How did you find him?" Nathaniel had added.

She had looked to Adrian before answering and had only spoken when her twin gave her a nod of encouragement. "We were heading west," she had finally answered. "We have kin in Waking Sea, out in the country where the laws against elves are more lax. If necessary, we would have gone to Orlais or Kirkwall."

"Didn't decide to quest through a haunted forest for the Dalish?"

"Do you make a habit of hunting for fairy tales and ghost stories, thief?" she had shot back at Malcolm. To Eliante, she had continued: "He was stealing from the inn whose loft we were sleeping in. Adrian offered to share our meal with him. He was… confused."

"I'm confused."

"Make him shut up," Katriel had finally snapped and Adrian had stood up and glared at Malcolm. Chuckling and shaking his head, the thief had finally fallen silent and permitted Katriel to continue her story unhindered. "He's a Tevinter fugitive," she had told them, "a runaway slave from the magister we met, Danarius. He was moving further south when he thought his former owner was tracking him into Ferelden; it turned out that the magister was… multitasking, so to speak. When he found out that we were fleeing troubles of our own, he told us what was really happening in the northern alienages."

"Tevinter is far, far away," Malcolm had remarked offhandedly, not completely deterred it seemed. "Seems a pretty self-important slave to think his master would come all this way just for him."

"He has lyrium engraved into his skin," Katriel had snapped in return before falling abruptly silent. Finally, barely audible above the howling wind and beating rain, she had added, "He didn't… he doesn't like people touching it, or getting too close."

"Seems like the two of you have plenty in common then," Malcolm had managed to get out before Adrian stood up and finally hit him.

Malcolm still fostered a purpling bruise along one cheekbone from the blow, but it had discouraged him from making any more side comments, at least in Eliante's and probably Adrian's hearing. And he probably didn't say anything like that to Katriel when the two of them were alone either, Eliante reflected, throwing an arm across her face to protect them from the sun's rays burning through her eyelids; he would be an idiot to do so, if the knife she had thrown at him in polite company was any indication.

"Typical noble," remarked a familiar voice with a familiar lofty tone as though lifted directly from her reflections. "Lounging about like a cat in the best patch of sunlight."

"Certainly the warmest," she agreed without lifting her arm from her face. "I didn't expect weather like this for months."

There was a thud as the thief took a seat on the deck beside her. "The hurricane that magister turned a sweet storm into blew hot air south as it headed toward the Free Marches," he replied. "Fair weather is probably the best present we've gotten from the northern lands in a score, wouldn't you agree?"

"What," Eliante said, sitting up too fast and then cradling her head in her palm to steady her throbbing temples, "you don't appreciate the slavers and the gold in Loghain and Howe's pockets?"

"I don't 'appreciate' the Tevinters or their fugitives," Malcolm replied, eyes hard like two chips of dirty ice that refused to melt in the sunlight, "and I definitely don't appreciate being lied to."

"Oh, leave Katriel be," she yawned a protest. "She didn't lie to you."

"She didn't tell me the whole truth then," he replied sharply, "which is about as bad. If I'd known that a magister like Danarius was skulking about Highever, maybe we'd have done things a mite differently and maybe things would've turned out a mite better. Like maybe we wouldn't have ended up with this baggage of a crippled Tevinter ship."

Eliante yawned again. "When life gives you lemons…"

"You throw them at whoever gave them to you," Malcolm finished. "Life doesn't give you anything."

"So what do you propose we do with the ship?" Nathaniel asked, coming up from behind them and taking a seat on a stacked coil of rope not far off. Dressed in a loose shirt and breeches like Eliante, he braced an elbow against each knee, leaned forward, and waited for an answer.

"We can't sail it into a proper Fereldan harbor," Eliante said.

"I was going to suggest we could run her aground somewhere deserted, like the Blackmarsh," Malcolm said easily, "but it seems a waste."

"Or just leave her at Alamar," Nathaniel suggested with a shrug. "The locals could use the ship at the very least as a moving wall to keep raiders out of their port. Then we take a proper ferry to the mainland, nice and inconspicuous, and get to the safehouse outside Highever on foot."

"Right," Malcolm yawned and got up, stretching. "Let me know when that elf, the onetime ferryman's apprentice or whatever, gets tired of steering or the waves get too rough."

Eliante yawned once again; the expression was contagious, especially with the sun and sea air lulling them all into sleepy deference. Some distance away, a fractured family of elves were sitting together and asking themselves what to do with the Tevinter gold Nathaniel had found below deck and distributed amongst the freed slaves-to-be. She fancied she could hear the clink of one counted coin after another reverberating down the deck as she lay her head back down against the warm planks.

Nathaniel's mind, however, was on other matters. "I don't like him."

Ignoring the fact that this was old, old news, Eliante said, "He doesn't like you either. Or Katriel."

"Oh, he likes Katriel just fine. He'd like her right into his bed, I'm sure." He slid off of the coils of rope, taking a seat on the deck next to her instead. "He's like my brother," Nathaniel continued, "only a version of my brother without the misplaced familial devotion."

"He's a Dryden," Eliante replied. "He came back with Levi."

"He came back because he wanted to come back," Nathaniel replied, somewhat sharp. "And he's not always a Dryden. My father hunted him as Mal Dendry."

"That's just an anagram of Dryden," she said, laughing now. "It just shows that he never forgot his roots."

"Does it now?" he asked and then was quiet.

Eliante was silent too for a moment, thinking, before she asked, "Whatever happened to Thomas in the end, do you wonder?"

"Trying not to," was the bleak answer. "Delilah stayed behind in part to keep him out of our father's schemes; after what we saw when we were trying to leave, I'm wondering if that was a lost cause. Speaking of Delilah," he pulled a small paper packet from his belt, "before we left the Peak, I'd just gotten the first letter from her. I didn't tell anyone about it or try and pick apart the code because I wanted my mind and everyone else's focused on the alienage, but I've done it now."

"And what does it say?" she asked.

"He's written Temmerly at the Vigil, telling him to prepare for his arrival."

"He" only meant one thing in their shared vocabulary.

"And?" she asked again, bracing herself. For what, she didn't know yet. "Something's scared him home?"

Nathaniel shook his head: a gesture she couldn't see. "I don't think we're quite there yet," she replied and then hesitated. "He's moving a prisoner to the Vigil. An important one too, or he wouldn't be handling it himself."

Eliante sat up again. "From Highever?"

"No," he shook his head again. "I suppose he's heard by now of how the city elves got their people out of the Arl of Denerim's estate and he's decided the capital is too unpredictable for a true base of operations."

"Who's the prisoner?" she asked, her words a nearly choked demand. It did not matter that it was not Highever; Howe could have decided that it was too risky a move to keep Eleanor Cousland prisoner in the city of her family…

A third time did Nathaniel shake his head. "I don't know," he answered. "Eliante, I don't know. He could have anyone."

Eliante was quiet for a long moment. Finally, she said, "When's the move happening?"

"A week and some days from today," was the reply.

"We'll be back on the mainland by then." She paused, considering. "I suppose you think we should figure out what we're going to do about this."

"I didn't say that," Nathaniel replied. "I'm not even sure if we can catch him unless we take a ship directly into Amaranthine instead of Denerim. I'm just glad that you've actually sat down and relaxed for half-a-moment since… since… I can't even remember," he confessed wonderingly. "I'd say Soldier's Peak, but you weren't really relaxing there. You were…"

Recovering. "Impressing people," she finished wryly and he chuckled. "Really," she insisted. "It was the exact thing Anora did by visiting the orphanages and gives alms to beggars, buying pies from market stalls and commissioning local seamstresses. Her compounded interest of goodwill is half of what's keeping Loghain in his seat."

He laughed outright this time and the sound of it thawed her heart as much as the sunlight did her skin. But even as she basked in the warmth of his smile and the early spring sun, her mind went to darker things and darker places, provoked by the mere contrast of one thing to another to travel to places where there was no sun at all. "Do you think Fergus made it to Orzammar?" she asked. "Do you think he got there and it went well enough without the warden-commander?"

"Fergus knows what he's doing," Nathaniel replied with certainty, "and he's traveling with capable people. He'll find his way."

"To where?" Eliante asked. "Home? Where's our home going to be when all of this is over? I don't want to go back to Highever," she confessed suddenly. "I don't know about my brother; he wasn't there, but I don't want to go back. I don't want to sleep in my bedroom and wake up in the middle of the night because I think I hear blades and shouting. I don't want to sit in the chair at the table I shared with him and my parents my last night there. I don't want to walk down the path to the treasury whose promise of family weapons claimed my mother's escape. I don't want to eat food cooked from the pots Nan's skull was cracked open against. I don't want to eat food from that larder."

He had let her continue uninterrupted until she was finished and once it was all over, she strangely felt the better for it. "There'll be somewhere," he replied finally. "No one is forcing you to be Teyrna of Highever if you don't want to be."

"But what about you?" she asked quietly and he knew what she meant. If she could walk away from Highever once she had taken it from her father's killer by calling Fergus out as the heir by birthright, Nathaniel had no such liberty.

"Better me than Thomas," he answered with a shrug and since it was true enough, they both let it go and instead watched the sun begin its descent over the shadow of the far-away Fereldan coast in silence.

The self-named warden-commander of Ferelden's dark hair was curling in the steam and smoke that filled Avernus's tower, even with all of the windows thrown open to the freezing mountain air. "It's not a difficult concoction to brew," Avernus was saying as Mordred's pale skin flushed with the heat of the small fire beneath the crystal vessel he now added drops of common darkspawn blood to, "but it's effects are disastrous if you get it wrong. The very first Grey Wardens learned that quickly. To say it would make you sick is a massive understatement."

Mordred found that he was sick of Avernus's droll tones by now, and that was an understatement. Despite his assurance otherwise, the ancient warden had continued to call him "boy" and cursed Mordred's ineptitude in understanding the order he belonged to at every opportunity after pursuing leading questions that could only end in a revelation of Mordred's total ignorance.

It was enough to make Mordred pity Alistair after a time, knowing that it could not be easy for him in Orzammar, fencing questions and fabled dwarven politics. But he remembered that that was why he had sent Fergus with the poor fool.

When Avernus was not cursing Mordred's ignorance, he was cursing Duncan's incompetence for his position in life of warden-commander. "Two dozen wardens," the ancient mage had fumed upon learning of the circumstances at Ostagar. "Two dozen wardens in all of Ferelden and a Blight on our hands. There is some warning of these things, you know. He should have been recruiting for a year at least."

"He did bring recruits down with him to Ostagar," Mordred had replied, feeling that he must give some credit where credit was due. He did owe Duncan, after all; for all that he griped about Alistair saying over and over again that he owed the man his life, it was much the same for Mordred. He did not like to think about what would have happened to him within the Circle's dungeons.

"Ah, yes," Avernus had agreed in the tone that Mordred had long since learned meant the complete opposite of whatever the old man was saying. "A cutpurse, a Templar, and while he did manage to snatch two mages from the Circle, he couldn't hold onto one of them and the other was possessed." Mordred let this slide. "And, oh, yes, what was the last one?"

"Some knight from Highever that won a tournament?" Mordred had supplied helpfully.

"Some knight from Highever that won a tournament," Avernus had repeated scathingly. "It's truly a wonder that the darkspawn haven't created a sovereign state here in the many decades I've been absent from current society."

"It's not as though your generation did much to push them back."

"No," Avernus had agreed with Mordred's own scornful remark. "We had other fronts, other threats to our survival, to Ferelden's future survival. And now your generation suffers from the fallout of our mistakes, even as you face similar fronts of your own."

But even as he found Avernus's strange sympathy for the mess Duncan had left Mordred and Alistair to deal with to be helpful, it seemed that from the first moment they met, the old mage would not stop prying into Mordred's past. It was annoying to say the least, and the dark shadow in the younger mage's mind agreed. It was one of the few matters upon which they were in complete agreement, in fact. Even as Mordred strained an ancient, withered supply of vervain and added it to the concoction, the ancient warden was asking him, "So have the Libertarians burned down the Circle Tower yet?"

"Unless Uldred's ploy with Loghain was a Libertarian plot, no," was Mordred's reply as he watched the black blood turn a dull brown-crimson within the crystal container. "In fact, I don't think that there are enough people left after what happened at the Circle for them to stick with their political affiliations. I think they're pretty much just all mages now."

"And what are you?" Avernus asked, pacing back and forth, observing the much younger mage's work.

Mordred barely checked himself before answering. "I'm a Grey Warden," he finally replied, deliberately obtuse.

"I meant before," was the immediate counter-reply. "I myself was a Lucrosian. It is wealth that is essential to any minority's survival, with the garnering of political influence close behind."

"Not many of you left," Mordred remarked. "It seems most Circle mages have decided that cooperation with the templars are what's most vital to their survival instead."

"Aequetarians and Loyalists," dismissed Avernus. "And what were you?"

Stepping back from the alchemy table, he replied, "It doesn't matter. Is this when one would add the Archdemon blood?"

"If there was any in our immediate possession."

"I'll fix that soon enough," Mordred replied, snapping out the fire with his fingertips and a muted spell. Turning to his inevitable mentor, he said, "I wasn't anything in the fraternities. I had too many preoccupations to devote my time to anything so useless. And by the time I found myself in Ferelden, it was easier not to."

"Due to your… distraction?" Avernus posited the question mildly, taking a seat in a wooden chair with carved arches of armrests.

Mordred looked at the ancient man sharply; frustration rising in his throat, and the shadow at the back of his mind purred its approval. "The more you ask," he said, beginning coolly but growing louder and angrier as he went on, "the more you pry, the less I'll say, if I say anything at all."

"Your age is showing, boy," was the dry reply.

"Is it? Well, as much as I know you've been all but interred here," Mordred said derisively in return, hating, hating, hating that word, "it's a new age. Welcome to it."

"You don't have much of an accent for a Free Marcher," said Avernus lazily, hardly missing a beat. His withered lips quirked into a rare smile.

There was no immediate cutting answer. Avernus's eyebrows rose. "How do you know I'm a Marcher?" Mordred finally asked quietly.

"The Amell family has had one foot on either shore of the Waking Sea for generations," was the ancient mage's answer. "What brought you to Ferelden?"

"Life in the Gallows," Mordred replied evenly, "was unsatisfying."

The statement inspired a quick bark of laughter from its recipient. "Indeed, you found it so?" Avernus said, still chuckling. "Unless the Circle of Magi has reformed drastically since my days in it and by your talk of fraternities it has not, I doubt it was your feelings about your residence that motivated the change of scenery. It was the templars, or perhaps an enchanter with some sway. Tell me truly."

"I don't have to tell you anything."

"Of course not," Avernus agreed with a grave incline of his head. "And of course nothing is preventing you from leaving this room or this tower, or this entire fortress for that matter. You could be leagues away from my prying questions and in full possession of all of the Grey Warden secrets I have given you. And there is nothing more. And yet here you are, even when there is work to be done, a horde to face, an Archdemon to slay, a Blight –an apocalypse –to end. Yet here you are. So what is it?"

Mordred opened his mouth to speak but the words died in his throat. Instead, it seemed a ghost curled around his neck and sighed deeply, softly speaking for him. "It's nothing," he heard himself say as though from very far away. "I tell you, it is nothing."

"You'll have to tell someone eventually," said the ancient warden quietly and not unkindly. "Eventually, you'll want someone, anyone, even if it's just one person to know. Like everyone else who walks Thedas, you'll long for your history to be known, whether it has been a secret for days or decades. I spoke to none for generations, my true account of Soldier's Peak and Sophia Dryden kept mum by isolation. I thought my research and my solitude would be enough to keep me at peace. It was only when strangers found me and demanded that story that I found true accord with myself, with the knowledge that I can finally leave this tired, tired world and know that something is not lost."

"Then why don't you?" Mordred snapped, somewhat spiteful. He did not linger for a lecture.

Avernus smiled: a tired, old smile that revealed nothing but amusement at the tempers of the youth. "There is a Blight raging its course across Ferelden," he said gently, "and I am still a Grey Warden. It is not something one can simply cease being. And so I find myself recalled to life to serve amongst Wardens, to face this threat in whatever capacity is best for my abilities."

"And I am… we are… grateful," was the wavering response, pulled from unwilling lips. Mordred pulled his cloak from where it lay tossed across a bare table and shrugged it onto his shoulders. "We'll go down south to Ostagar," he decided, "and we'll find whatever Duncan had with him in that tent. If he carried the vial with him into death, we'll find that too. And I'll be back with it."

Avernus shook his head. "There's no need to return, boy," he said. "Your time is running short and another visit this far north without any other cause would be foolish. You know all I can currently teach you. If I find something worthwhile in these libraries, in my memories, I have ways of contacting you. Go. But remember… you'll want someone to know before the end."

Nodding a brief farewell –he disliked goodbyes intensely –he left Avernus's lonely tower for what he expected to be the last time and, hunched against the bitter wind, made for the main keep of Soldier's Peak. But when he pulled at the door to the warmth awaiting him within, the heavy wood would not budge. And Mordred suspected with growing dread that someone had locked it from the inside, knowing that doing so would leave him exposed to the mountain elements all along the uncovered bridge.

Rubbing his hands together, he pressed his palms to the door and murmured a quiet incantation. Runes traced in pale blue lit up the wood: a mirror image of a spell carved into the very being of the door from the other side that glowed faintly before fading once more. Mordred bared his teeth. Whoever his unknown enemy was, they were a magic-user with knowledge of enough tricks to spell-lock a door.

Back to Avernus, he thought, but the idea of returning so soon to the ancient mage and with such a reason set fire to his easily-abused pride. The sleeping shadow at the back of his mind hissed agreement. No, he could think of something else.

Teeth chattering, he looked upward and around, searching for a window or… anything. The fingernails of his hands felt like chips of ice, exposed by fingerless gloves and that grunt –Mark? Matthew? Malcolm –that grunt's mocking warnings about frostbite came rushing back to him. He looked back to Avernus's tower, remembering the mage's parting words –"You'll want someone to know before the end." –and decided if it was a spelled lock that he could not break, he doubted Avernus could either.

With a deep breath, he made his decision. The wind howled in his ears and he let his own power course out of his body to join it, whistling up a wind to twist and snake with the gale, scattering flakes of snow of its own account. Once he had picked up a feel for the gust, for the storm, felt it coursing through his own veins as it did through the valleys and canyons of the mountains, he pulled it under his command and sent the force of it rushing forward to blow the spell-locked door off its hinges.

He might as well have been the Archdemon itself rather than a Grey Warden if one judged by the uproar his less-than-subtle entrance provoked. The great room of Soldier's Peak, once a chamber dominated by Avernus's ancient yet active summoning circles –Mordred could still sense the scar of the rupture in the Fade –had become a common place for the fugitive families that inhabited the ancient citadel. Some days, the onetime Wardens' hall was all but a nursery for mothers who desired to socialize their offspring, even in a state of war such as this.

It just had to be one of those days. Mordred heard someone scream as he dusted snow from his shoulders with casual grace. Multiple people screamed at his entrance, actually. Suddenly, Ferelden wasn't so different from his childhood in Kirkwall after all.

From opposite ends of the hall, doors slammed open against stone walls. And the fools rush in, Mordred thought dryly as both Levi Dryden and Morrigan marched rapidly forward, each demanding a variation of: "What happened?"

Actually, it seemed Morrigan wanted to know: "Did you have to make such of a mess?"

Mordred's reaction to her cavalier attitude was immediate. Uncaring of the watcher and of said watchers' opinions; he stormed forward, backing his lover up against the wall. "Did you do this?" he demanded. "Because it wasn't funny. I swear to you, spell-locking that door and leaving me with a blizzard for company wasn't funny."

His chilled hands were tight around her exposed upper arms, his gaze furious and unyielding, but Morrigan glared up at him, unblinking, and replied without scorn, "I don't know what you mean. Speak sense, if you must speak at all; I much wonder at what that decrepit old man has put you up to, to have you return in such a delirious state…"

"Avernus means well," Levi said uncomfortably, stepping forward. "I don't know what's going on here and, while I'm sure I'd rather not, I'm also sure I rather should." To the women and their children, he said, "Go elsewhere, if you please, while we see to the door."

They obeyed him easily and Mordred almost envied the complacency the good-natured merchant Dryden inspired in his kin and fellow commoners. The solitude was thus simply achieved; what was more difficult, however, was prying his fingers off of Morrigan's arms. One by one, he willed the tension in his fingers to abate until his arms fell loosely back to his sides. "You said the spy was dead," he said flatly to Levi when that was done.

"She is," the makeshift steward of the fortress replied, a crease in his forehead. "Fell down a flight of stairs."

"Fell? Or was pushed?" When Levi didn't answer, Mordred continued. "Your nephew found her."

"Aye."

"Your nephew was also the one that found out her system."

"Aye."

"'Tis simple then," Morrigan drawled. "Your nephew pushed her."

"It's not so simple," Mordred said quickly when Levi opened his mouth in indignant denial. "The story goes that your nephew was also… intimately acquainted with her."

"That's one way of putting it," Levi agreed bitterly.

"Then maybe he was turning her," the warden-commander continued, "and she wasn't the only spy at Soldier's Peak."

All three fell silent as though they feared the walls themselves were leaning in to listen. And perhaps they were. But Morrigan, fearless as always, defended her initial point. "It is still simple," she said, indignant. "It is simply that this second spy and your nephew are one and the same."

"Mal hates Howe more than anyone," Levi said in his kin's defense, "and, besides: he's not even here."

"Then perhaps there is a third spy."

"Perhaps they're all spies," Mordred cut in. "It doesn't matter. One of them locked me out; one of them is working against us. Whether it's because I'm the Grey Warden or because our reputation is now tied together with these northern rebels, one thing is clear to me: it's time to go."

Levi did not protest; he merely nodded and said, "Whatever works best for you. You're saving the country; you need to do what's best so you can go do that," before turning to examine the shattered doorframe.

Morrigan, however, rounded on him. "Go and do what?" she hissed.

"What I'm supposed to do," was Mordred's impassive reply, starting down the hallway and not looking back to see if she followed.

She did. "What you're supposed to do," she repeated, "or what you need to do? What about what I need you to do?"

With those last words, she pulled his shoulder and turned him around so that he faced her. He regarded her coolly. "You said there wasn't a time limit on this."

"I said, 'The sooner, the better,'" the younger witch of the wilds snapped, "and this is not sooner. This is not sooner at all."

"We're going south," he replied briskly after a beat. Turning away, Mordred added, "Make of that what you will."

"I will not!" Morrigan snapped. "I will have you explain it to me, immediately. How south? Where south? You will answer me or you will wish you had remained locked out on that bridge!"

"It's a Grey Warden matter," he answered and her gaze became fired with her fury, "or at least that's what I'll tell Fergus Cousland." Unfolding a bit of paper pulled from his sleeve, Mordred continued, "It seems there's a new king in Orzammar and, that being finished, Fergus, Alistair, and Leliana have gone to Denerim."

"Whatever for?" Morrigan demanded, peeved still.

Mordred shrugged. "The letter wasn't specific. Let him keep his secrets… for now. Denerim is as good a place as any to regroup, and Zevran's already there. Whether or not he's managed to accomplish his task is irrelevant; I'll need him if I'm going to meet the Dalish."

"Don't waste your time," she replied with a sniff, turning to move up the stairs toward the personal chambers allotted to the Warden party. Mordred, rolling his eyes, followed. "The assassin cares nothing for his so-called 'people' and I doubt the Dalish would waste their energy on such a lost cause as he. Take him along to meet my mother, why don't you? He's exactly the sort she would appreciate."

"And what sort is that?" Mordred asked, amused despite both himself and her.

"The sort that will never be missed," she answered with a sly smile back at him. Chuckling despite himself, he followed her up the stairs, reconciliation attained… at least for the moment.

He was not quite sure what drew him to her; indeed, he had never been. He had been eighteen and on his own for the first time in his life when Duncan dispatched he and Alistair to light the beacon atop the Tower of Ishal at the ill-fated battle at Ostagar. When his first "outing" so to speak had gone wrong, so horribly, horribly wrong, he had awoken in a foreign bed with a dull ache in his shoulder, and that woman –that odd woman, Daveth's witch of the wilds –that Mordred had already almost forgotten leaning against the crudely carved fireplace, her pale, pale back to him as she gazed into the flames.

He had seen she was beautiful, even through the haze of pain and the other, ever-constant haze: a veil drawn over his mind like mist conjured up by the shadow ever-present in the corners of his vision. She had touched his shoulder to shove him back onto the bed when he had tried to get up too quickly and every nerve in his body roared with agony and… and she had not recoiled. She had not been rebuffed by the sense of wrongness that coursed his skin like a thin sheen of rainwater; those that had attempted physical contact during his Circle days had had… different reactions. And he could not blame them; he felt it himself, constantly, like a hair shirt scratching against his flesh where others merely felt the shadow of the sensation when they saw the collar peeping out beneath a Chantry priest's robes.

She had explained it to him later, after she had pushed him into bed sometime after their departure from Lothering with very different intentions in mind. Mordred had let her, half because of the fresh Taint buzzing through his veins, his shadow-friend humming in his mind, because it would be easier to just go along with it than have to devote a preciously spare thought at his own disposal, any meditation free from the domination of most of his mind to keeping the shadow-friend at bay, to dealing with her peeved sense of rejection. He already had to contend with the Cousland noble that Alistair had insisted upon rescuing and the aptitude of Fergus's already suspicious mind made paranoid by the news of his family's slaughter. And the other part of his reasoning had been: Why not? The woman was lovely and she was willing and according to Anders it was great pastime to have a lover. So why not? With the way things were, he was likely to be dead before he had another such opportunity.

"It has power," Morrigan had declared, sliding him a sly, sideways smile, furs clutched against her bare chest in the firelight of her self-segregated campsite, far away from deranged nobleman, equally deranged Chantry sister, sociopathic qunari soldier, and bumbling templar-turned-Grey Warden.

"You have power," she had elaborated on another such night, outside of Redcliffe when Fergus –calmer now –had gone off to relieve Alistair's watch and Mordred could guess by the look on the noble's face that it would be an interrogation to follow. Morrigan had kissed him lazily, a strange incidence to follow their rather passionate albeit emotionally cold engagements. His being there at all so long after they had both finished and he had even dressed as even more strange, but there they were. The world was changing.

"And unlike the fools you no doubt encountered in your Circle Tower," she had continued with that same self-satisfied smirk, "I am hardly afraid of power."

And he did have power, albeit power that came with a cost. And few knew what that power cost him; no one knew the true extent, not even the enchanter with his long and narrow features and coolly reassuring smile could have known. And no one knew, not even Fergus who had made the best guess of all, how close Mordred had come to losing himself to the beast within.

Looking back, he was fully aware of everything that had transpired since Uldred had spirited his body away to the upper levels of the Circle Tower and… done what he had done in his effort to provoke Mordred's shadow-friend and finally put a name to the fascination Uldred had harbored even before his own dark deal.

The shadow-friend had been thoroughly convinced that these fabled Ashes of Andraste that Fergus had begrudgingly led their company in pursuit of would shake his hold, and so Mordred believed that the fistful of dust Fergus had flung into his face in the inner sanctum of the Gauntlet was the source of his new heightened clarity, the mental breathing room that he now reveled in. He looked at the world with sharper eyes now, and perceived many things he found new enjoyment in… and some matters in which he would have preferred continued blissful ignorance.

Morrigan's apparent attachment to him was one of the latter.

And fools rush in, he thought wryly, thinking back on his own eager acquiescence to her advances in those early days of traveling, how easily her words of survival and power had appealed to his psyche.

"You agree, don't you?" cut in the woman in question's voice in present time. He shook himself out of his reflections and looked to her. "You agree that this nephew of Levi's cannot be trusted."

Mordred shrugged. "We'll be gone before he can do any more damage," he replied indifferently, "but I hope it's not so, because, if it is, given the way the Cousland girl trusts his judgment and brought him along to Highever, this rebellion will be over before it begins."

"I had a thought."

"Did you now?" Eliante leaned her elbows against the railing, once more basking in the sun as she looked down to the white wake streaming away from the boat's passing. It was another, different ship this time –even more crowded and less serene –but the gentle rocking of the waves and the breeze coursing through her brown-red hair turned pure auburn by the sun were the same. She closed her eyes, listened to the whistling of the wind and wondered if she could whistle up a storm to delay Rendon Howe's journey to Vigil's Keep with his favored prisoner in hand.

More privately, she thought that they had entertained several of Malcolm Dryden's "thoughts" already. Against her better judgment and no doubt Nathaniel's, she had already allowed the noble-blooded thief to convince them to take the ferry from Alamar into Amaranthine rather than Denerim. His reasoning was sound enough: "Denerim is still top full of slavers and sanctions. Loghain's still holed up in the palace and he's got his eyes on his city. Howe's focus is stretched far and thin over two arlings and a teyrnir," he had said persuasively. "He's spread his net wide in the hopes of catching one of you, but at the cost of a looser weave. You can slip through his fingers again and again and again and again until he hangs himself from plain frustration."

"I was thinking about our conversation earlier," Malcolm said easily as he leaned his back against the railing and tipped his head back, eyes falling shut against the sun as his sandy hair fell away from his forehead, "and I was thinking that you don't want the good arl Howe to die all quiet-like in private. You don't want him to hang himself in the privacy of his bedchamber; you don't want him to die by the hand of some nameless sellsword in the field. You don't want some assassin's blade to find him in the dark where you can't see. And he being out in the open, transporting this prisoner seems like the perfect opportunity to make sure none of that happens."

"What are you saying?" she asked, although she had a good idea of the answer to that question.

"Let's go kill the bastard," he said smoothly. When she looked up at him to judge his seriousness, he was smiling broadly, confidently. "I'm serious, Eliante: the moment we step off this boat, we go and we find him and we kill him."

"You can't really be serious," Eliante replied, even as her blood rose at the prospect. "It's an armed escort, Mal, and how do you even know about it?"

"I have my ways," he answered simply, "and there are ways to get around an armed escort. We just need to draw the arl and a small party out into the open. And I know just how to do it."

"What about the prisoner?" persisted Eliante, determinedly ignoring the thrum of her veins in approval at his scheme. "Shouldn't we be focused on saving them?"

"Depends on who the prisoner is. D'you know?" When she shook her head hesitantly, he went on. "The last thing we want is for this rebellion to turn into what the Civil War in the south has become. Down there, word is that people are dying but nobody's winning and it's because none of the banns or the arls have the guts to go to Denerim and challenge Loghain in single combat and cut off the Regency's head… literally. This is our chance to do just that."

Katriel, walking past, presumably noted the signs of an argument. To Eliante, she advised, "Give it up. There's no winning with him."

"How can you say that?" Malcolm objected, indignant to the teeth. "Of course there's winning with me. You just have to content yourself with my winning is all. And right now," he turned back to Eliante as Katriel rolled her eyes and walked away again, "if you're winning, I'm winning."

She regarded him impassively for a brief moment before she smiled despite herself. Shaking her head, Eliante asked, "How do we draw Howe out into the open?"

Malcolm's answer was prompt and ready: "Easy. We bait and switch."

"With what?" she returned bitterly. "He already has a prisoner he clearly wants to keep safe. It could be anyone: it could be Anora, it could be Fergus, it could be a Grey Warden, it could be," she caught her breath and the corners of her mouth twisted, "it could be my mother."

"He has your mother maybe," the thief replied, "but we have his son."

Ignoring the implications of the latter portion of that statement, she swallowed hard and said again, "He could have anyone."

"That's true too," Malcolm acknowledged with an intentional step forward, "but we have his son. Come on, Eliante. Let's bait and switch."

"With Nathaniel?" she said doubtfully. "How do you propose we do that?"

"Easy," was the equally easy reply. "He was loyal to his father once; we create the illusion that he's willing to be loyal again. Write a little letter, send a little bird, set up a little meeting, and you and I are just the little intruders on the little family reunion."

Eliante hesitated. "He would never agree," she said with certainty. "Whatever he might say, Nathaniel would never agree to setting up a trap for his father under the false pretense of reconciliation. He wouldn't help."

"We don't need his help," Malcolm said with a shrug. "We're both capable of lifting a quill –or at least I am."

"Howe will know his son's hand," she said unhelpfully.

"There are ways around that too," he said with strange, certain calmness. "He doesn't even have to know, Eliante. You want to keep him safe? Keep him safe. We could just do it, together, just you and I. Let's bait and switch."

She looked back at him strangely for a long moment before turning around to walk away. "I'll think about it," she offered uncertainly before disappearing below deck.

Malcolm watched her go and then tipped his head back to meet the sun once again, expression as unreadable and as unchangeable as the sea lapping against the wooden hull of the ship that bore them closer and closer to Ferelden's shores.

Feedback always appreciated!