Chapter Forty-Four: A Hundred Thousand
Delilah Howe found that she seldom slept easily as winter gave way to spring. Rough winds shook the coastal lands, howling against her windows as spring squalls marked their presence along the craggy beaches and cliffs. When morning light finally peaked over the eastern hills, the granite slabs of the coastal peaks, Adria would often knock at and push the bedchamber door ajar only to find her young mistress wide awake and fully dressed, the heavy curtains of both bed and windows pushed back to admit the grey morning.
The out-grown nursemaid would set to work, chiding as she went about re-lacing her charge's bodice, dusting the corners of the chamber to send enterprising spiders scurrying, and frowning at the thrown-open shutters and rain-splattered windowsill. "Catch your death, behaving like that, Miss Delilah. Is that what you want?"
"I just want," the young woman, overgrown girl, would answer, hands clutched against her chest, "some air."
Adria would click her tongue and shake out the sheets while absentmindedly informing her charge of all of the latest, most benign local happenings. Yet beneath the gossip, there was something darker: murmurings of Dalish activities in the Wending Wood, whisperings of a breath of life in the Blackmarsh. Something had changed, the common people were breathing amongst themselves, with the apparent death of the Theirin bloodline. The death of the king had upturned the accepted course of nature, poisoning the land itself, turning the countryside against the vassals of the lord who had turned against the rightful ruler. Something was rotten in the state of Ferelden, and its festering presence did nothing more than aid and encourage the darkspawn marching farther north all the time.
And Delilah Howe stood at her rain-washed window like the proverbial lady in a tower, listening to whispers of old evil rising from the roots and bedrock of the country.
But when Adria turned away and exited, arms liked wizened tree branches full of dirty linen, Delilah pulled the crumpled bit of paper from against her chest and read it over once more, the code she had long since learned to decipher unfurling before her eyes. Quickly, as though fearing eyes looking over her shoulder, she pressed it back against the apex of her collarbones and looked out of the window once more.
"A hundred thousand," she whispered to the rain. "A hundred thousand."
She spent the morning carefully copying out the missive into a childhood code she had once shared with Eliante and slid the paper into the lining of her wool mattress with the rest of the letters she had accumulated over the past months. She had long since realized that trying to get her father's plans to the rebels was little more than a pipe dream at best, house arrest or imprisonment at worst, but had reflected that the papers might be worth something in the future… especially if her younger brother kept following his current course of action, stubbornly insisting that their father's actions were for the greater good. But he had not told their father of Delilah's betrayal that night when Eliante, Nate, and the mage had slipped out of the Vigil, not even for 'the greater good', and for that she was grateful. The walls of the fortress had not yet tumbled down around her ears and she was safe.
Yet when she went to bed that night, she had just barely shut her grey eyes and drifted off into the Fade when she heard a bloodcurdling shriek reverberate throughout her bedchamber. Shaken out of slumber, she bolted upright, clutching the sheets and furs against her sadly diminutive –she reflected even then –chest, eyes darting from one shadowy corner to another.
Fumbling with her bedclothes, she swung her legs out and planted each foot onto the icy stone floor, fingers grappling to clutch a blanket about her shoulders. Barefoot, she padded out of her chamber, armed with a lit candlestick, and shuffled down the stone steps toward the Vigil's main thoroughfare, all the while envisioning darkspawn, risen Avvar, a man gone mad with drink, a woman shaken out of bed by an intruder. Carefully, she inched along the corridor, the palm of her free hand pressed against the wall, roughly spun tapestries trailing beneath her fingertips, until she reached the next door.
But just when her fingers had curled around the latch, another hand reaching out from the darkness behind her, pulled at her shoulder and turned her around. Delilah jerked backward, brandishing her candlestick like the sword her father had never allowed her.
Adria, a nightcap perched upon her frizzy grey hair, stared at her charge as though Delilah was the ghost of Vigil's Keep. "What in Thedas are you up to now, Miss Delilah?"
"I…" she hesitated, staring back with wide eyes. "I thought I heard someone scream. Was it you?"
Clucking her tongue again, the nursemaid shook her head. "Night terrors," she decided firmly and took a step forward, steering her nobly-born charge back the way she had came. "Back to bed with you, chick."
It was only after the bedchamber door had closed behind her once more that Delilah realized that the scream she had heard had been her own.
The next morning, her father rode into the courtyard of Vigil's Keep with a face like thunder and Delilah instinctively took a step back from her window. She thought of a time when she might have run out to meet him, grey eyes worried, asking, pleading, "Has something happened, Father? Father, has something happened?" And he would tell her about some bandits or some criminal he had to bring to justice in the city and she would tremble with relief that nothing had really happened; that nothing had happened to her, her father, or her family, the three things that mattered most in Thedas.
That time was long gone. Something had happened, Delilah knew full well; sweet Maker, something had happened and her father was upset, angry, seething, and here she and Thomas were to bear witness to the aftermath.
There was a flurry of preparation for the arl's arrival, just as there had been before, but this time Bann Esmerelle was nowhere to be found and Delilah might as well have been absent also. She let Adria dress her like a pale-faced doll, pinch her cheeks to conjure up color, pad her dress to give the impression of healthy eating.
"It's your favorite," the woman said to her, half-entreating, half-pleading, and indeed there had been a time when Delilah had fancied that the autumn hues had been a striking foil to her dramatically dark coloring.
"I look like a diseased tree," she replied flatly now, staring at her blurry reflection in the polished metal mirror and Adria had clicked her tongue again, the once comforting sound now annoying beyond comprehension.
"Best behavior," she warned her charge and Delilah didn't have to be told twice.
She caught up with Thomas in the corridor between kitchen and great hall. Her younger brother was pale and sober, but that didn't stop him from glancing sideways and greeting her with, "Why, if it isn't Daddy's little traitor."
Within the instant, she turned on him, yanking his shoulder around to face her. "One word," Delilah snapped at him with a voice like Death come up out of the grave. "One word to him from you, Tom, and I will never forgive you. More than that, you will be completely and utterly alone in this. Do you want that?"
He jerked away from her and Delilah wondered that she had never before foreseen a moment when her younger brother would recoil from her touch. "What do you know about being on your own, dear sister?" he spat back. "What do you know about it? I have always been on my own. Are you just angry that now the tables are turned and now you're the one sitting in the corner all by yourself? Self-righteousness makes for lonely company, Dee."
"Who are you," she bit back, "and who is Father to talk to me of self-righteousness?"
Then the doors opened and both of them turned to go into the great hall like a pair of carriage horses with trained steps and trained smiles. She rested her fingertips on her brother's sleeve as lightly yet as convincing of familial affection as possible; he smiled, but turned his neck slightly away from her as if the fireplace's glare was reflected on her face. They smiled at their father as he sat some ways down the length of the table, the both of them as taut as lute strings.
Delilah dipped her head in greeting as Thomas let her go –very willingly –to take his own seat, eyes carefully trained on the floor, fearing what she would see when she raised them to her father's face: what she was sure would be the physical toll of all of the things he had done. Dreading it all the while, she lifted her gaze, eyes raking over doublet, shirtsleeves, and the faint spots on his throat… and there was nothing. He had not changed. He had not changed at all.
Quickly, she slid into her seat. Numbly, she felt the material of her skirt ride up against the backs of her legs, but she didn't readjust or tug the fabric into place. Staring at her plate, she listened for the sound of the dinner audience, the common folk flocked to the Vigil to watch their lord eat and leave with the assurance that the good arl was in good health and that the land was prosperous and at peace and all was well. She was so accustomed to tuning out the rabble that she thought she had never heard them in the first place. But when she finally tore her gaze away from the stamped pattern of her plate, she looked out upon an empty room. There were no petitioners, no wide-eyed gawkers, no lowly banns come to beg a scrap from the arl's table. For the first time in her nearly two decades, dinner in this most massive of chambers was solely a family affair.
That was not to say there weren't a few servants shuffling from foot to foot near the kitchen door, no, Delilah reflected, attempting to melt into the kitchen door. Above them, the huge clock ticked dully, counting out moments of sheer tension, until…
Thunk. Crimson bled down the length of the embroidered table runner. Delilah, leaping to her feet to avoid staining her dress, traced the sharply sweet liquid's path through plates and candlesticks to Thomas's upturned goblet. It appeared that in his haste to pour himself a drink, he had upset the balance of an already fragile situation and he knew it; she could see it in his white face and shaking hands as he desperately attempted to mop up the mess with the hem of his shirt. Scared, Delilah thought as her brother ruined his shirt more and more with each swab. Scared and stupid with it.
Their father seemed to agree with at least the latter half of that thought. Rendon Howe slammed his palm down flat against the wooden table and, without turning to look at the attendants he spoke to, declared, "Leave us."
Eagerly –too eagerly, Delilah thought –they obeyed, practically stepping all over each other in their haste to exit. She found herself longing to follow; if she didn't know her place and what was expected of her, she would certainly have been the first out the door. But she knew better.
Thomas had stopped swabbing at the spill and instead stood at hapless attention: doublet undone, shirt hanging out and stained scarlet, knees looking like to begin knocking against each other at any moment. But he had every reason to be shaking in his boots.
Delilah was grateful to be all but ignored as their father sunk his shoulders back into the embrace of his high-backed wooden chair, threw up his hands, and announced, "I wonder sometimes what I have done to deserve my lot in life, if the Maker himself is hell-bent determined to punish me for my continual failings. But it is certainly true enough in these days that my two sons can only be my own comeuppance. What else can explain why all I have to speak of for sons are a turncloak and a skirt-chasing, lack wit drunkard?"
Her younger brother's face burned more brightly than the torches perched in sconces along the walls. "I'm not a—"
"What evidence points to the contrary?" Rendon Howe shot back, long face twisted into a scowl. "What have you done save chase skirts and drink wine? My men tell me all of you; do not believe your coin is valued higher than mine. What have you done, save eat, sleep, breathe, and fuck whatever pair of legs spread themselves for you?" Delilah's face burned too now; even if she knew her brother's habits, to hear her father reiterate them before her was another thing entirely. Their father shoved off from the table and stood. "At least Nathaniel fights, even if it's not for me," he said with no small amount of bitterness. "At least he stands for something, even if he stands against me."
Burning now with anger rather than embarrassment, Thomas stood straight and demanded, "You would compare me to him, to that turncloak you still call son?"
"No," Rendon answered quietly, "he's no son of mine. But neither are you in your current behavior. Almost three decades ago, I was fighting the damned Orlesians; I was still fighting the Orlesians. I was little more than a turncloak myself in many eyes when Tarleton died at Harper's Ford and I joined with Bryce, Leonas, and the others. I was as young as you, younger than you, at White River, but I would have fought to the death for what I believed was right. Even if Nathaniel is misguided and idiotic, as cunt-struck as you for maybe the first time in his life, he does the same. That is more than can be said of my second son."
Delilah watched as Thomas slammed his own palm down upon the table, never more alike to the father who claimed no true kinship to him. "Again, you compare me to him," Thomas replied with loathing. "You will never stop comparing me to him, even when he is a traitor and I am the son who stood beside you. Is that all you've come home to do, Father?"
Rendon Howe's lip curled. "Hardly." He turned away from his children and walked down along the length of the hall, pacing past portraits of the Howes that had come before them and whose painted eyes now observed their descendants' doings. Delilah wondered what they made of all of this, looking down upon Ferelden from the Maker's side.
"Every noble in the Landsmeet is either a survivor of the Occupation or the progeny of one," the arl continued as he paced, "and yet they are all perfectly content to invite the monsters who killed their fathers and sons and raped their wives and daughters back onto our land."
"To fight the darkspawn," Delilah said softly and then instinctively ducked her head, waiting for the wrath of her father to come down upon her head as it had upon her brother's.
"Other monsters," her father agreed, surprising her, "but once the Orlesians step into our borders to fight them, they are not likely to leave, no. First it will be hunting out the last pockets. Then it will be aiding in the restoration. Then they will claim that Loghain is an unfit Regent and they must supervise the election of a better one. They will campaign for their chosen supplanter and, one way or another, the mummers' farce of a Landsmeet they will arrange will elect him. Then it is but one small step from regency to throne and the chevaliers will pour over the borders in legions. History will repeat itself."
"The Landsmeet isn't stupid," she replied, just as softly as before. Her father wasn't stupid either; she could feel some fluttering of hope that she could pull him around to the better way of thinking. Somehow.
"Not inherently," he allowed, "but it is desperate and it is full of nobles whose pockets have been plucked bare by the Blight. And it is top full of people who would like nothing better than to pull me down –pull us down. Eamon, suddenly so blessed with good health, is openly against us and his brother Teagan is in Orzammar, no doubt lobbying for dwarven support for the memory of Rowan and Maric's son. That hothead Fergus Cousland rides with the Grey Wardens and Maric's bastard. He has the dwarves and the mages behind him already. Even if he's on lukewarm terms with Redcliffe proper, he's got his friendship with Rainesfere backing him still."
"All very far away," Thomas shot back, still stung.
"Need I speak of affairs closer to home?" Rendon replied, his voice deadly quiet. "Surely your whores have mentioned the mayfly teyrna and her hundred thousand rebels. My informants certainly have. The common folk are certainly whispering it amongst themselves."
Delilah kept her eyes on her hands as Thomas sputtered. "There aren't a hundred thousand soldiers left in the north," he insisted. "The Couslands are dead. Their army is dead at Ostagar. There aren't a hundred thousand fighting men left in the north that aren't ours or Loghain's."
"All that remains of the Bannorn has fled north and they haven't come to us," Rendon said darkly, returning to the table to pour himself a glass of wine. "And I did not say a hundred thousand fighting men; I said a hundred thousand."
"A hundred thousand weeping women and frightened children," his son replied dismissively.
The onetime hero of White River raised his glass in an ironic toast. "You would be surprised what weeping women and frightened children managed to accomplish during the Occupation," he said mildly. "And they're led by a Cousland –the least of the Couslands but a Cousland still –and your turncloak brother. But I confess it eludes me why I bother to tell you of all those that stand against us when it seems that my two sons are my nearest and dearest enemies."
Feeling her brother's hot gaze upon her, Delilah closed her eyes. So this is his choice, she thought sadly. He'll tell, to save his 'honor', to 'prove himself.' I suppose I should have known better.
"I am not your enemy," Thomas said quietly, sinking back into his seat, voice solid but hands shaking beneath the table. "I am anything but your enemy. I have never been anything but completely loyal to you, to Amaranthine, to Ferelden. You would have never even known about what Bryce Cousland was doing if it hadn't been for me."
Delilah's eyes snapped up to her brother's face in shock and saw that there was nothing light or laughing in his expression; nothing desperate either. Thomas was, for all intents and purposes, utterly sincere. And she found that as he spoke, she believed him.
"I didn't have to go to you, that night at the Kendalls' estate," he continued, growing bolder with each moment that his father did not cut him down. "I didn't have to tell you what I saw, show you what I saw, in Bryce Cousland's room. And I got them back before Cousland's man and that Orlesian bard knew any better. Nathaniel didn't do it. Nathaniel wouldn't have done it. I did."
"You did," Rendon agreed, partly fond, partly amused, mostly tired, Delilah noted, but weren't they all? "You did. And I am glad of it."
"I am loyal," said Thomas and for the first time that evening, he sounded completely assured in himself as he rose from his chair. "I am on your side, Father. I don't know what more you want from me."
"I want you to be my son," replied Rendon Howe. He looked to Delilah then, and included her in his next statement. "I want you to be my daughter. I want to know that I can leave this place –whether it be leave the Vigil or leave Thedas –and know that everything I have worked for, everything I have built, everything I have done for love or for my country has not been for nothing." He looked between his two present children. "Can you do this for me?"
As Thomas nodded with his old stubbornness and began a tirade of all the ways he would make him proud, the wheels in Delilah's wind were whirling into overdrive. She knew she didn't have much time, that they expected an immediate answer, but also that there was only one answer she could give and expect to exit this room without issue. But there were other answers, answers that she would have to give herself. Cognitive dissonance was an unpleasant sensation.
If Thomas was right, and their father believed him –furthermore, the father that they had had over a year prior, the father she remembered as her own, had believed him –Eliante was wrong. Eliante was wrong… and yet she was still right. Nothing excused what came after, Delilah wanted to reason, not even treason… and yet wasn't that the way their world worked? Treason must be met with harsh and swift punishment; the Bryce Cousland she remembered would have been the first person to say so. But attacking a man in his own home, with his wife and his son's wife and child suffering a penalty they had not deserved…
"My greatest friends, Delilah," he had told her the night Eliante had first disappeared from Vigil's Keep, "my greatest friends and they turned on me when I had the gall to question their treasonous dealings. What else could I do then, my dear? It is a lucky thing that my men caught up with me; otherwise Bryce's place and mine might easily have been reversed."
"Your father is a man, just as his soldiers are," Eliante had informed her coldly in a darkened pantry. "What makes him so immune to the same base impulsive cruelties? His noble breeding? His education? Your father never misses an opportunity to rail against the Orlesian chevaliers and they had both the bloodlines and the schooling. Their atrocities are legend, and Rendon Howe's work at Highever matches them blow for blow."
Who did she believe: the girl who had seen the horror herself? Indeed, Eliante had seen it all firsthand and moreover been the victim, had lost just about everything she knew, but Delilah knew full well that grief had no doubt blinded the girl to all of her parents' own evils so that she only saw Rendon Howe's. And, Delilah reflected, she had not been in the room when the arl had 'tried to reason' with the teyrn and his wife; she had not seen the spark that had set off the blaze.
So did she believe the man who claimed he had? He was her father, but him being her father did not mean that everything he did was right in the world. She had never known him to lie before; was she still blinded by a daughter's affection, as she claimed to both of her brothers that they were blinded by a son's? Thomas supported the story of the Couslands' treason with his own that he had seen the documents himself; what cause had he to lie? Nathaniel claimed otherwise, but even he had asked her to plead for mercy for their father; he had not been in that room either, when Bryce had allegedly turned on his best friend. Or was it the other way around? Everything went around in circles and it never seemed to stop.
Whose side am I on? She asked herself, thoroughly miserable. Whose side should I be on? Everyone is doing things because they're convinced that they're right; I'm not convinced. I'm not anything.
One thing she knew for certain: what she had seen, what had been done to Eliante, was wrong. How could she begin to forgive any of that? Unless her father had never known… but how could he have not? And perhaps he had and he had not cared; perhaps he hadn't and he still would not have cared.
When she felt the eyes of both her father and brother on her, it took everything in Delilah's power to keep from sinking to the floor and crumpling into her skirts. As she looked between grey eyes so similar to her own –and to Nate's, she reminded herself, the one Howe absent at this family conference –she thought wryly, Why should I be on anyone's side? It's clear that nobody is on mine. It's ruined, all of this. It's spoiled; we all spoiled it, the Couslands, the Howes, the Orlesians, the darkspawn, Eliante, her father, Nate, Tom, our father, our mother if one looks back that far. And if I keep trying to tear myself into pieces to make sense of all of this, to find a line, I'll be the one who ends up paying the price in the end.
She looked back at her father and he looked kindly back. She thought of the sweet daughter he saw when he looked at her, and then she thought of who she had become, of who his actions and who her choices had made her and of how he really didn't know. He might not like her so much if he did.
"I want," he said to her, to only her, she fancied, "to know that all is not lost, that there can be something that comes after, even with the mistakes I've undoubtedly made."
Finally, she nodded. "I understand, Father," Delilah replied quietly, and vaguely enough, she thought.
Mercifully, this seemed to satisfy him. Turning away, he said to the both of them, "I'm leaving for Denerim again in the morning. Loghain is already… having difficulties with the other nobles, and I must return before he says something irreparable." He crossed the space to his son and placed both hands on Thomas's shoulders. "Hold the Vigil," he instructed with quiet resolve. "If these mayfly rebels march on her walls, let them throw themselves against them a hundred thousand times and die a hundred thousand deaths. Pour pitch and fire over their heads, rain down arrows by the dozen. But do not open the gates."
"I won't fail you," Thomas replied with his own determination and Rendon, pleased, clapped him lightly on the shoulders, smiled at Delilah, and went out.
The torches flickered and a draft crept up to lick at Delilah's shoulders. Thomas shivered, looking around at the firelight flickering against the portraits along the walls. She thought for a brief moment that his grey eyes lingered on the stretch of discolored stone where their mother's likeness had once held an honored place. When she was certain their father was gone, she stretched out a hand toward her brother. "Thomas…"
"Don't, Dee," he said quietly, turning away. "Don't scold me for going to him with it. I didn't know what he was going to do. How could I have known? All I knew was that Nate had run away to the Marches, that Father was waiting for me to step up and be the new Nate, and here was my chance to prove myself, lying on the desk in Bryce Cousland's bedroom with a popped seal and fancy Orlesian script."
She looked at him for a moment before replying. "You can read Orlesian?"
Thomas blinked at her. "That's what you want to know? Whether I am competent enough to have read what I handed over to Father? You're really asking the hard questions here, Dee."
Laughing slightly despite herself –she really just couldn't help it –she said, "You're right. Why were you in Bryce Cousland's bedroom?"
"I had an appointment," he replied stiffly. "Don't make me go into details to my sister. The point is that I saw it and… and I read enough to have an idea. Delilah, what was I supposed to do?"
"I… I don't know," she admitted. "I don't know what I would have done; truly, I don't."
Thomas smiled a ghost of his usual smirk. "I do. You would have asked Nate."
"Nate wasn't there," she pointed out, and then fell quiet, considering. Thomas shuffled from foot to foot, waiting. When she spoke again, she asked, "What happened to the documents?"
He smiled with quiet pride. "We copied them over and left duplicates, as best we could manage. Kept copies for ourselves, sent the originals down to Loghain at Ostagar." His smile faded. "Maker knows what happened to them there. Probably buried six feet under by snow and corpses if Loghain didn't happen to have them tucked into his armor on the battlefield; I don't think he went back to retrieve personal effects when he sounded the retreat."
"No one's going back to Ostagar any time soon," Delilah returned grimly.
"No," her brother agreed, "probably not. So the Landsmeet and everybody else may never know the truth, or believe it anyway, and Father will be remembered as a monster by Nate and by everyone else."
And me, Delilah thought, if I never knew. On that note: "Why didn't you tell me," she demanded, "before? Why didn't you tell me?"
Thomas smiled his broken smile back at her, the one that no doubt won him so many tumbles behind the mill and in the stable loft and various noble's borrowed bedrooms apparently. "I thought it would be easier for you if you didn't know," he answered bitterly, "like it'll be easier for Nathaniel. Like it would have been easier for me. Pity, isn't it?"
As I said before, there's no telling who walked in and read the documents sitting on the desk in the arl of Denerim's estate… I am alluding to Harwen Raleigh as Cousland's man in Urien's estate. We really have no idea who he's really working for or what he really wants, except that he's got the hots for Marjolaine and is working with her. Whether it's because he just wants in her pants or not is another question. Personally, it being treason and all that, I think it's more than that; banging her is just a perk.
Also, I figure the documents being fakes is reason enough for why the deal Marjolaine set up doesn't seem to go through and Leliana gets into trouble. I am of the opinion that Dorothea sends Leliana on a wild goose chase hunting Marjolaine and the documents; I don't believe a word she says about them being "personal." Personal correspondence between Cailan and Celene, or Bryce and Celene maybe… but there are so many plot holes in Leliana's Song that I'm up to my ears trying to make sense of them. I personally think Dorothea and Marjolaine were working together from the start and the drama Leliana's caught up in is just them trying to cut each other out of the deal. Dorothea certainly supplants Marjolaine with Leliana later on…
"Something rotten in the state of Ferelden" – clearly a reference to the play Hamlet's "Something rotten in the state of Denmark". Some very similar themes between the play and DA:O in that everything goes wrong when the king, God/the Maker's appointed ruler on earth/Thedas, is killed by apparent foul play without a clear and/or accepted heir.
Furthermore, the entire conversation between Rendon and his children is inspired by one of the scenes in Shakespeare's Henry IV Part I where the king is chewing out Prince Hal for hanging out with Falstaff. A hundred thousand rebels in the north have a part in that play as well.
Cheshire: Sorry there's still no update on Eliante and Nate! They'll be back soon. As for Leliana, well, she's not one to just quietly go back to where she came from.
Feedback always appreciated!
