The two surviving Grey Wardens in Ferelden were left undisturbed on their bench in the stone well of Redcliffe's courtyard. The castle came to life around them in a medley of moving parts like the machinations of an Antivan doll-theatre: small clusters of figures sliding past each other as though following hidden tracks. Workmen bearing tools glided towards the parts of the castle that had been left in disarray by the abominable child; wheelbarrows of rubble made the same journey in reverse. Scullions and sweeps scuttled past with fearful glances over their shoulders, as though the enemy still might be lurking behind pillars or in the question of empty rooms. The arlessa crossed the courtyard once, trailing her pair of Orlesian maids . Fragments of her native tongue drifted like curls of smoke in her wake. The bann's men passed more frequently, distinct by the muted autumnal hues of their Rainesfere garb. Their movements were brisk and purposeful: they had an expedition to organise. Although Teagan Guerrin still believed that the quest to seek the Ashes was both fantasy and folly; he was determined to provision them beyond what was necessary.
Finally, like a chorus of downcast stagehands shuffling on to clear the stage as the final applause waned, the refugees trooped past. Led by the castle steward towards their temporary quarters, none bothered to spare a glance at the impressive architecture that cradled them. The blows had struck like a volley of foot-long bodkin arrows: not only had they lost family, home and livelihood, but there was a Blight . It seemed inevitable that the dark tide that had drowned Lothering would soon rise up to swallow Redcliffe too.
Nobody approached the pair on the bench. All knew them to be Wardens (although this did not entirely make sense, as they were far too young and unweathered) and so perhaps they believed them to be strategizing; considering their next move in the wake of what could only be described as a second painful defeat: the loss of Lothering. These alleged Wardens sat six inches apart, their bodies aligned towards each other at an almost imperceptible angle.
For accuracy's sake, it was not strictly true that two Wardens sat on the stone bench. According to archaic tradition, Flora ought to have served a year in the Order's ranks before her title of recruit could be exchanged for Grey Warden. Still, the slaughter of the entirety of the senior brethren had hastened her promotion.
There was also no discussion of strategy or tactics between the pair. They sat in silence; each preoccupied with their own thoughts - or, in Flora's case, lack of them.
Alistair had finished mending Connor's novelty knight. The weight of it - the armour was not tin, but steel shaped in miniature - felt comforting in the broad, calloused clench of his fist. The edged metal bit into his skin and kept him from blurting out anything that might hint at the dreadful realisation that he had experienced only minutes earlier: that he had fallen in love with his sister-warden. The revelation had not been accompanied by an excitable fluttering of the stomach, but by a churning nausea. He had been thrown from the saddle and the ground was rushing to meet him: ready to split his skull like an egg and spill his brains over the cobbles.
It's the wrong time.
We can't get distracted.
We're kin, or as good as. I call her sister.
Whatever happened between her and Duncan, she's still got it in her head.
How stupid I was, to think that I could hold her in my arms and kiss her neck; and have it mean nothing but desire. How reckless. Of course it meant something. It planted roots.
Alistair glanced sideways at her, fearful that Flora had felt the sudden shiver that ran through him like a needle of ice. As usual, her face betrayed nothing. She was gazing steadily forward, the eyes pale and lucent as pear-flesh. The contrast between the dark red of the hair and the underwater pallor of the skin was breathtaking.
He wondered what she was thinking: perhaps she was grieving the loss of Lothering, or ruminating over the vastness of the task that faced them. She might have been thinking about their departure on the morrow: their quest - ridiculous word! - for the Temple of Sacred Ashes.
He saw her lips part in preparation to shape a question.
"Will you help me get fit?"
Of all the imagined queries that Alistair had placed on her tongue, this was not one of them.
"What?" he said, wondering if he had misheard her.
"Will you ," Flora repeated, patiently. "Help me. To get fit."
"Fit?"
" You know. 'Athletic'."
She spoke the word gingerly, as though it were foreign. To reinforce the meaning, she patted the muscled brawn of his arm: broad as a man's thigh.
"Why?" Alistair asked, still too confused to summon more than a single syllable.
A crease folded itself across Flora's forehead: her lips pursed at the sourness of the memory.
"I lost my air running this morning," she pronounced, solemn as a magistrate at sentencing. "From the great hall to the courtyard."
She recalled it too well: both the red-faced panting and the sneering contempt from her general.
"I see." Alistair matched the gravity of her tone. "When do you want to become - ah - athletic by, sweetheart?"
Such language was reckless; it slipped out unbidden, automatic.
Flora thought about it for several moments, the crease in her brow deepening.
"By tomorrow," she said at last, and shot him a mildly perturbed glance when he grinned. "What?"
"Nothing." He bit back his laughter: the cobbles were rushing to meet him once again. "Nothing. Well, you know what this means, don't you?"
"Eh?"
"You'll need to exercise."
Flora shot him an appalled look, eyebrows launching into her hairline.
"I don't - I don't want to do that," she whispered, astonished that he would even propose such a ludicrous suggestion.
"But- "
"No thank you," she said, polite and firm as a child rejecting vegetables. "No exercise."
As Flora spoke, her hand rose in a thoughtless intimacy. Her palm curled over the top of his head to flatten the errant strands that rose at the temples. When they still refused to lie flat, she licked her thumb and ran it along the place where the hair met the skin.
No exercise, she repeated to herself, thinking on the ritual that her brother-warden performed every morning: the bladework, the stances, the lifting of whatever heavy object was to hand.
Her hand continued to meander over the top of his skull. Even when they were at Ostagar, Alistair had never relied on the unpredictable happenstance of combat to maintain his strength. The ritual of physical drill was one ingrained at the monastery: honing bodily condition was as important as learning the stances of the sword.
The thought of running laps around the battlements sunk Flora into a deep gloom.
While she ruminated, Alistair fixed his eye on a shield-shaped cobblestone and willed his heart to return to a normal rhythm. He was acutely aware that she could feel a pulse like a finger-beat against her skin, and his own was sure to betray him even if his tongue remained mute. Her small, stroking fingers felt red-hot against his scalp: an exquisite torture that he did not want to stop.
"I ought- " he began, then cleared his throat. "I ought to find the masons. I said I'd help to clear the rubble in the great hall."
"Mm." Flora removed her hand absentmindedly, scratching her nose.
Alistair stood up, drawing the damp-laced air to the bottom of his lungs to steady himself. He remembered then that he and Flora had a price on their heads; that the redemption of Redcliffe Castle meant that a steady stream of arrivals from the village and beyond were now crossing the narrow span of stone to work, sell, entreat or deliver.
How easy, he thought, looking at the pale curve of his sister-warden's neck as she sat there. How simple for an assassin to slip in behind a rumbling cart.
"Be careful," he said to the top of her head, catching a flash of inscrutable grey as she looked up at him. "Don't - don't let yourself run out of air again."
She gave a mumble that sounded like agreement.
As Alistair went to put his strength to good use, Flora remained on the bench; considering how to fill the candle-lengths until dinner. She was not used to sitting idle, and yet there seemed to be little she could do to contribute. She had run out of patients to mend; Leliana and the bann were organising the supplies for the journey to Haven. If they had been in the village, she would have sought a place on a fishing-boat for the day. The prospect of venturing from the castle and making her way down to the village was too intimidating: Flora was not used to setting out alone. She lacked the inquisitiveness to explore the labyrinthine interior of the castle itself.
Eventually, Flora roused herself from the bench. A fruitless half-candle was spent wandering around the squat foundations of Redcliffe's many towers; following the perimeter of the wall until her way was barred by a fall of rock. It did not seem to be recent - the stone was furred with moss - and she wondered if all castles were in a state of perpetual decay.
Stares clung to her everywhere she went: curious, admiring, wary and desirous in equal measure. Flora was used to being watched. She was chased away from the kitchen by an old man with the long, boneless frame of an eel, flesh sagging from his cheeks.
Yarrrrr! Get out of here!
During her hasty retreat, Flora spotted a clump of crimson mages within a doorway. Keen to avoid either interrogation or education from Wynne, she decided to pay a visit to the man she could not mend: her most infuriating patient to date.
Second most infuriating. Duncan was worse.
Her inability to cure the arl made her jaw clench painfully tight. Flora understood well enough that Eamon Guerrin's sickness was rooted in a curse rather than blight or poison. Still, the impotency she felt was alien: a man should not remain comatose after her attentions. She had felt similar frustration when mending Duncan: each part of body or mind that she purged of the taint was recorrupted daily. It was like trying to fight off a many-armed octopus; or hold back the tide. Sometimes the Warden-Commander had even resisted cleansing in the midst of the act, despite having requested it only moments earlier.
Duncan was the most annoying patient I've ever had.
Not through any fault of his own. He was never wholly himself, especially at the end.
The guards at the Guerrin family tower knew Flora now, and let her pass without challenge. She did not need to search her memory for the route to the arl's bedchamber. A steward, soft-spoken and deferential, offered to guide her: she followed in his careful tread. A pair of sentries stood at either side of the wooden arch that led to the arl's quarters. To Flora's bemusement, her presence was not questioned. She was admitted to the unconscious arl without accompaniment: a fact astonishing in itself. She was, after all, a mage, unescorted by guard or Templar, a stranger, and the subject of a wanted poster hanging at that very moment in the local tavern.
The arl's condition remained unchanged: physically, he resembled a man in a deep stupor. Recalling the decrepit specimen they had encountered two days prior, Flora took some small comfort from the flush of Eamon Guerrin's skin and the even beat of his heart. Aware that he would deteriorate once more in her absence, Flora pressed her mouth to his and exhaled a lungful of ether: hoping that this might preserve him until her return.
Maybe I should stay here, she thought, brushing a gilded filament of energy from her chin as she returned upright. Make sure he doesn't get bad again.
There came an immediate flicker of disapproval.
You will be needed at the Temple of Sacred Ashes.
But I'm not an explorer. A mender's job is to stay with a patient.
A mender's 'job', as you so crudely state, is not to 'stay with' a patient. A mender's 'job' is to cure a patient. And the cure is within the Temple.
Flora could not argue with this logic.
I suppose -
She did not get a chance to finish her thought. The muted hush of the arl's sick-chamber was split by a clearing of the throat: sharp, brittle and feminine. Somehow, even this shifting of phlegm managed to come across as imperative.
Flora, heart sinking to her belly, turned around to see the arlessa. Isolde Guerrin stood rigid near the doorway, trailing the same pair of downcast Orlesian maids. The unyielding posture would have been the envy of any statue and her jaw was set with a deliberate tautness. Despite the fixed stiffness of her frame, there was an unusual tremor in the woman's voice as she spoke.
"Will he perish in your absence, do you think?"
Flora glanced back over her shoulder, cast her mender's eye along the arl's drowned-man body. The breathing was shallow but regular; the skin had a greenish-grey greasiness. When she had put her mouth to his to exhale the ether, she could taste the burnt aftermath of the curse like cinders on her tongue.
"Dunno," she said, honestly. "Maybe. I don't know nothin' about what's ailing him."
The arlessa flinched with a swiftness that betrayed her: a flicker of genuine regret clenched the corners of her mouth. It passed, and she composed herself; turning her gaze back on Flora with a bard-like intensity. Flora felt like a fish with a hook caught in its throat, wondering if all blue-eyed Orlesians had similarly penetrating stares.
To her dismay, Isolde Guerrin took several deliberate steps to close the distance between them. When she spoke, her voice was cloaked in a conspiratorial hush.
"Come now - is this an act, some player's ruse? You may drop it in front of me: I am familiar with masks."
Flora had no idea what the arlessa was talking about. She felt the back of her neck prickle with sweaty discomfort. There was no escape, the woman stood between her and the door. A single square of light on the bedding represented a lofty window: too high to be of use.
"I am greatly indebted to you," breathed Isolde, the words emerging in a whispered tangle. "And so I would not betray you. It's all a masque, isn't it? This commoner's tongue, the garb, the humble origins. I would wager Eamon's arling on it."
Flora felt a familiar confusion overtake her: the same bewilderment that had once accompanied every classroom session in the Circle.
"Eh?"
"Does this 'Herring' even exist?"
The arlessa's eyes flashed like a fish-scale in sunlight: bright and curious. Flora wondered how many bones she would break if she hurled herself from the window; and if she could mend herself before the arlessa came down to find her. She had no idea why she was being subjected to an interrogation; nor why her unremarkable origins were being so keenly questioned.
Fortunately, at that moment Isolde Guerrin's attention was diverted by a sudden sneeze. The arlessa immediately swooped on her maidservant - Maker forbid any new ailment be inflicted on the vulnerable arl in his current condition - and ushered them from the chamber.
Flora was grateful for the reprieve. Exhaling the air that had caught in her throat during Isolde's scrutiny, she decided to spend the rest of the day in a place where nobody would go looking for her.
In the time of Eamon Guerrin's father, the library at Redcliffe Castle had been an afterthought. The previous arl had been preoccupied with hunting, feasting and killing Orlesians (in that order) and little time for anything else; let alone academic pursuits. Rendon Guerrin had once famously boasted that he had never spelt his name the same way twice. As a result, the castle library - which served as the family archive as well as a collection of knowledge - had been sorely neglected.
Fortunately, Eamon Guerrin had proved himself to be different from his father in all ways except the physical. Once Ferelden had settled into a tentative post-war stability, the new arl set himself the task of transforming the mildewed, echoing hollow of the castle archives. It had taken two decades, but now the vaulted space strained at its seams with overloaded bookshelves: texts spilled onto the tiles like water. Several reading tables had been set up for visiting scholars; only beeswax candles were permitted in the elevated iron sconces. The family archives, which ran to a total of twelve leatherbound tomes, were kept in a polished oak chest beneath a sigil of tower and mound.
Flora was shown to the library by a clerk garbed in rumpled Guerrin crimson. As he led her along a procession of bare stone corridors, he explained that, by some miracle of the Maker, the archives had weathered the recent chaos without injury - in fact, save for a single toppled bookshelf, they had emerged unscathed. He then enquired - with meticulous deference - whether Flora would require assistance. If she sought a particular book or scroll, it would be far easier for a castle archivist to locate it within the overflowing stacks. According to the clerk, one such scholar had survived the undead attacks.
Flora wondered whether to reveal that she had no intention of reading anything; that she was both incapable and unwilling. She declined the clerk's offer with the usual gentle bluntness, then wandered off to find a spot where she could evade attention for the rest of the day.
The first reading table was aligned with the open doorway; if she sat there, she would be in clear sight of all passers-by. This would entirely defeat the purpose of her presence in the library, and so she chose a table sequestered within a cluster of overcrowded shelves. Books, bound in leather and vellum, were stacked from floor to sloping eaves; the collective knowledge created a well of shadow across the tiles. A hanging candelabra, half-extinguished, made scant difference to the gloom.
Having settled herself on the bench, Flora swung a suspicious eye from left to right. She was astonished by the sheer volume of words that surrounded her; and awed at the colossal waste of time that they represented.
Think of all the things the authors could have filled their days with instead. Actually useful things.
Her spirits, the general in particular, were not impressed.
Repulsive child! Your wilful ignorance is one of your most vile qualities.
ONE of them? Flora was intrigued.
Bah!
Disgust curdled in her mind like three-day milk.
Somewhat chastened, Flora let her eyes wander along the bookshelves once more. Each crowded volume represented a leatherbound taunt: not for you. It seemed unfair that she could speak Kingstongue with reasonable proficiency; that her ear understood it well enough; but when the same words were scribed on parchment, they became as alien as Ancient Tevinter runes.
What's the point of all these books? she thought, feeling ashamed and vaguely mutinous. Does anyone actually read them?
Frequently.
My dad can read the sky and sea, and that's good enough for him.
Good enough for a fisherman who never leaves the coast.
Her general was annoyed.
Flora, in a conciliatory mood, stretched out a hand and plucked a book at random from a shelf within reach. It was a slender tome no wider than her thumb, bound in mottled, cheaply dyed crimson leather. At some point in its lifetime, it had been rained on.
Fine, she thought. Watch me educate myself.
The book, opened at random, disgorged a small cloud of dust and disintegration into Flora's face.
AN: Oops! So sorry for disappearing for a month. It's summer break from college, and I'm looking after my daughter all the time; plus we went on holiday, and I'm buying a house and doing legal stuff, plus my sister's wedding is in a few days… it's been a really crazy summer! But I'm still writing, just at a much much slower pace than during term time, lol.
This was a fun chapter to write! I love any Flo-Alistair interaction, especially when she goes off on some random tangent. I also really like the idea that Isolde, who's used to masquerades from her Orlesian heritage, is convinced that Flora is just pretending to be a lowly peasant!