Up the long, treacherous slope they go, and at the top lies a tiny grouping of thatch and wattle huts, laid into the landscape like they've been here forever. There's a man waiting for them at the top of the path, scowling sourly at the sight of them. Marian squeezes Alistair's hand and then lets go. "Hello," she says, a little wary in the face of this stranger's obvious displeasure.
"What are you doing in Haven?" he demands. "There is nothing for you here."
She barely hears the rest of his words. "Then this is truly Haven?" she says, so relieved that she wants to fling her arms into the air and dance. With any kind of luck at all, they'll find Brother Genitivi and be on their way inside of half an hour. They can be done with this ridiculous idea.
The man sneers. "What do you want?"
"We're looking for a man named Brother Genitivi," Marian says. "I'm led to believe he's here, somewhere." She casts a dubious glance behind the man, at the few, poor houses that comprise this place. There's a chicken hunting worms not ten feet from where she stands. It's hard to believe that anything here could capture a scholar's interest.
Though there's another path up another steep hill on the opposite edge of the village green. There must be something more up there.
The man – Marian cannot think of him as anything but a guard, not when he's hovering so protectively between her party and the rest of the village – seems to lose interest. "Who?" He shakes his head. "Perhaps Revered Father Eirik will know of whom you speak."
Revered Father? What?
When she tries to ask, the guard turns away each of her questions with mounting impatience before ordering her and her companions out of the village. When Marian presses him, he gives grudging permission for them to resupply at the village store, and then stomps away, ignoring her increasingly baffled questions.
A store, in a village this small? Who has need for a store here? A traveling peddler would do them well enough, and free up a building for any number of things.
It's stupid to focus on insignificant details, Marian knows, but she's learning to trust her instincts when they say that something's not right. And right now, they're screaming.
The store is across the way, just there. She'd thought to interrogate the shopkeeper next, but as she looks around, she spots a boy in front of one of the houses. He's playing a lonely and silent game with some rocks.
"Are any of you good with children?" Marian asks thoughtfully.
In the end, she and Leliana approach him by themselves. There's no use in all of them crowding around the boy and turning him shy or scared. She sets the others meandering, and she's gratified to see that Alistair has his shield on his arm instead of hooked on his back. Zevran has his arms crossed, near the hilts of his daggers, and Wynne is using her staff as a walking stick when she needs no such support. They, too, know something is wrong. She's not making things up.
Marian hovers as Leliana opens her mouth to ask the boy a question, but before she gets the chance, the boy looks at them, a dark, knowing set to his face that has no business on a child, and speaks.
"Come, come, bonny Lynne
Tell us, tell us where you've been
Were you up, were you down
Chasing rabbits 'round the town."
He goes on, and on, and on, until Marian is near to screaming, talking about poor bonny Lynne and the awful things that happened to her.
Then he goes back to his game, and nothing Leliana says can persuade him to give them any more of his attention.
"What was that?" Leliana asks after they've withdrawn, deeply unsettled. Marian knows exactly how she feels. She'd seen something gleaming between the boy's fingers, something that looked very much like a human finger bone.
It was something else, Marian tells herself. If only she could believe it.
She takes Leliana and Alistair into the store with her, leaving Alistair to haggle with the shopkeeper in favor of wandering the building, looking for – she doesn't know what, honestly. Something that might explain this place. She drifts between bags and barrels and boxes, stoops to examine the contents of an intriguingly carved chest, and finally turns her eyes toward the back of the store.
"What are you doing? That's private," the shopkeeper says, his voice rising in what sounds very much like panic. He hurries around the counter and pushes his way in front of her, blocking her way with his whole body.
"Isn't that part of the store?" Marian asks, raising her eyebrows, biding her time. Alistair is coming; she can see him moving cautiously toward them out of the corner of her eye. In a moment he'll be in striking range. Leliana is somewhere behind her.
"It's none of your concern," the man says, glaring.
Marian drops her voice, so he has to lean a little closer to hear what she's saying. It comes soft and persuasive from her mouth. "I'm only here looking for my friend," she says, spreading her hands. She's no threat. She's just a girl with too many questions. "Please, can't I just check?"
His face grows dark, eyebrows drawing together. "You have no right!" he spits. His hands clench into fists.
If she ever had a chance to persuade him to step aside, she's lost it now.
The shopkeeper takes a swing at her, swearing about interfering lowlanders. It's so easy to read his body language that it feels like she has years to prepare, to call her magic to her spread hands and freeze him in place before Alistair can do more than reach out for his wrist. Marian finds herself enraged by the pointlessness of it all – they're three to his one! What did he expect would happen? She shakes her head at Alistair's enquiring glance. She's fine.
"Tie him up," Marian orders. "We need answers."
She slips around his frozen body and through the doorway to find out what the shopkeeper had been protecting. At first it looks like nothing, just a storeroom like storerooms everywhere, dusty and crowded with odds and ends that no one has any use for. But there's an alcove at the far end, and that's where she finds the bodies.
One is so fresh that it hasn't started to smell yet, but someone has hacked his limbs from his torso and taken the head away, so that the poor man is only a pile of dismembered limbs. They've left him his armor and shield in a careless pile. She can just see the crest of a white keep on a red hill, which marks him as a knight of Redcliffe.
Poor bastard. He'd come so far, and for what? For this? Marian drives back the hot and angry tears with an effort.
No one should die like this.
The other two are just bones, piled this way and that like they don't matter a bit.
Marian stares at the grisly scene for a long time before Leliana finds her. "He's reluctant to speak," Leliana says, before she looks around and spots the corpses. She's silent, too, for a long moment. Marian looks over; her eyes are closed and her lips move soundlessly. She's praying for them.
What good is the Maker going to do them now? They're dead, and all the prayer in the world won't bring them back, or make right what these people have done to their empty shells.
"I think I have a few more questions for him," Marian says tightly, and leaves Leliana to beg an absent god's forgiveness.
"You," the shopkeeper snaps at her as soon as she passes into his sight. "You don't belong here!"
"I found something else that doesn't belong here." Marian crosses her arms and stares at the man. He's sat in a chair in the middle of the room, and he's kept there solely by Alistair's presence. Even as he spits venom at Marian, he keeps glancing up at Alistair, as if he's afraid.
Alistair is the least scary person she knows. The idea that he's the bogeyman in the room today is an odd one. But she supposes that if all one saw was his muscles, and his height and broad shoulders, and the well-used sword that hangs on his belt, then he might be something to be feared.
Another day, she'll laugh. Another day, she'll tell him the joke, and they'll both laugh. But now…
"Who were those men? Why did you kill them?" Marian demands.
He spits on her. She jerks aside, though it doesn't save her from the spittle. She feels like someone's slapped her.
Alistair hits the shopkeeper, very casually, and he doesn't pull the blow. "Don't do that again," Alistair warns him. He's not even angry. He might as well be at the market. "You won't like what happens."
Marian angrily scrubs her face with the hem of her tunic. Now she's angry and dirty and all she wants to do is burn this blighted abomination of a village to the ground and walk away.
Now that she thinks about it, it might be easier that way. The huts are only thatch and wattle, daubed with clay. They'd burn beautifully. They'd have plenty of time to find Genitivi before the whole village goes up, and who cares what happens to the villagers? As far as she's concerned, they're all in on it. It'll save her the trouble of dealing with them individually.
And everything is always so much more beautiful when it's burning.
It feels so good to let her magic run down her arm, to let loose the tight strictures she has on her power, to allow it to pool in her palm. It doesn't take conscious thought to set it aflame, only the absentminded desire to watch it burn.
And then Alistair's there, big, beautiful, golden Alistair who talks too much and says too little. He grabs her wrist, forcing her to look at him. "What are you doing?" he demands.
She stares at him, her eyes wide. For a moment, just for a split second, she wants to turn her hand over and pour her flaming magic over him, to watch him burn alive before her eyes. She can already hear him screaming. It's beautiful, and soothing, and so exciting, and all she has to do is –
Alistair's eyes sharpen. "Focus, Marian!" He shakes her like a kitten, distracting her for just a second, but it's enough, it's just enough, for her to regain a measure of control. She rips herself away from the Fade with a strangled sob. Her handful of flame dies instantly, leaving her palm stinging.
Marian's left with a sick taste in the back of her throat and a slow, creeping horror that prickles her skin. She'd had a demon riding her. A demon. She hadn't noticed the tenor of her thoughts changing. She hadn't noticed anything. And if Alistair hadn't… if he…
The stinging behind her eyes is just reaction, she tells herself. She has to be so careful. And instead what does she do? She lost control of her emotions, the one thing that must never, ever happen.
Alistair's watching her carefully, his grip on her wrist so tight. It grounds her. What would she have done if he hadn't been here? "I'm all right," she tells him, carefully steady. At his dubious look, she smiles, though it's a pale, weak thing, a bad imitation of her usual cheer. "I know," she says. "But truly, it's gone. I can tell."
His hand gentles on her wrist, though he doesn't let go. "What happened?" he asks.
She sighs. "There are three bodies in the back," she tells him. "Two are rotted away, but the third… " She gropes for the words, but she can't explain what the sight of that body did to her, the heartsick sorrow and the anger that followed. She's seen more than her share of bodies lately. This should have been nothing new, but… something about that poor murdered man got to her.
Alistair casts a dark look at their silent prisoner. "Then we have a lot to talk about, don't we?" He looks back at her then, and she can see that he's worried about her still. "Why don't you go talk to Wynne?" he says. His thumb is stroking her wrist, though she thinks he doesn't realize it. It's comforting. "Leliana and I can take care of this."
A movement at the window by the door catches her attention. The boy is there, the one from before, peering at them through the glass. He sees everything and then he's gone, too fast for her to shout.
"I think we have a problem," Marian says shakily.
They hadn't tied up the shopkeeper because there's no rope to be had, so Marian slaps a force-field on him and they hastily leave the store.
The others are crowded around the door, their backs to her, facing the silent, threatening villagers who have surrounded them on all sides, pressing them against the building. There's so many of them – even if they're all unarmed, they're still menacing by sheer force of numbers.
"There is no need for this," Marian says. Her voice wants to tremble, but she can't let it. Not now. She doesn't want to fight them. It's not fear; how could it be? But she doesn't want to hurt them.
There's no conversation, though. Someone tries to pull Wynne away by the arm, and someone else throws a large rock at Sten's head, and two of them are coming at Alistair with murder in their eyes…
Avoiding a fight isn't going to be possible, not anymore. Marian angles herself as best she can and pours cold from her bare hands, but she can't freeze them all, not when she feels raw inside where the demon touched her mind. Heart-sick, she draws her little knife and sets to work.
Killing is different when the blood runs down onto her hand. It'll leave a stain, she thinks, gone numb.
When it's done, she stands over their bodies and just looks at them, wonders what they could possibly be hiding that's worse than this. Why was this necessary? Why had they attacked?
"Search the rest of the houses," Marian says to her companions. "If you find anyone else, don't hurt them. We need answers, not more death."
The searches go quickly, because there are only three houses in this place, and Zevran beckons to her from the lintel of one of the houses. His normally cheerful demeanor is gone.
Whatever this is, she doesn't want to know. She doesn't want to know.
Marian swallows down her trepidation, leaving a queasiness in her stomach. Suddenly she is weary beyond belief. She supposes she'd been foolish to hope that this, unlike everything else they've tried to do, would be easy.
She crosses to Zevran, and they enter a charnel house.
Half of the house, the half to the left of her, is precisely what she expected – a bed, a pot on a fork over the fire, a few chairs, a clothespress. Someone lives here. But to the right of her… the altar is very large, the wall behind it bare as if the altar is the only thing of importance. It's soaked with blood, and so is the wall around it and the wooden floor. Some of the bloodstains are fresh. Some of them are so old they're nearly black. They are all extraordinarily large. One of the stains, an older one, reaches nearly to the toes of her boots.
She cannot reconcile the two sides of the room. Here it is homely, even warm; there is a grisly murder scene.
"I wonder," Zevran says thoughtfully. She turns her head a little, so that he's just visible out of the corner of her eye. He's not disturbed in the least by the altar, by what it implies. Of course. Why would he be? "The Crows often made sacrifices of blood, and it gave them uncanny abilities."
"What kind of abilities?" Marian demands.
Zevran just shrugs. "It was not wise to pay too much attention."
Marian remains silent for a long time, going through the ramifications in her mind, but even now a part of her is wondering that blood sacrifices work on the non-magical, and why that might be…
That's a dangerous train of thought, and she shuts it down firmly as she turns away. This will not help her solve the puzzle of Haven, or find Brother Genitivi.
She hopes with all her might that he's not one of the nameless skeletons in that man's back room.
More villagers, better-armed ones, block the second path up the hill toward what Marian hopes is the rest of the village. She has no more luck talking to these men than she did the others. Everyone she talks to here is staggeringly dedicated to something she doesn't understand.
But why is this necessary? What kind of secret is so terrible that they'll kill, and worse, to keep it?
Marian doesn't participate in the fight, not that they need her. There are six very capable people and a mabari with her. She has no fear of failure. And… she's reluctant to touch the Fade again so soon after the catastrophic failure in her self-control. What if it's still there, waiting for her? Stalking her? What if she can't throw it off this time?
She has no doubt that the rest have noticed, though hopefully only Alistair and perhaps Wynne have any idea why she's behaving so strangely.
They leave the bodies where they fall and make their way to the top of the hill, which is dominated by a huge, old Chantry that broods watchfully over the village like a sullen templar. It's far too large for a village this size, which could only boast a congregation of twenty, at the most. It is quite old, though. Perhaps it's a relic of an earlier time.
Morrigan pushes open one of the deep, heavy doors, and they file into the Chantry. Someone is holding services, but they're lead by a man; Marian had forgotten that the guard talked of someone named Revered Father.
None of this makes any sense.
"What is this place?" Marian asks, and then she listens with interest as the Revered Father tries to dismiss her, tries to order her away, tries to intimidate her, all without telling her what this thing they're protecting is.
"We don't owe you any explanations for our actions," Eirik says. "We have a sacred duty; failure to protect Her would be a greater sin." Marian is struck by the strangest thought, that under other circumstances she would have enjoyed meeting him. There's humor written in the laugh lines of his face, conviction in his voice, honesty and steadiness in his eyes as he watches her. He's summing her up just as she is summing him up. They both know what comes next.
She also knows that there won't be any talking him out of this, either.
"All will be forgiven," Eirik says, as if to himself.
Marian hesitantly touches the place in her mind where her magic lives. She can't baby it any longer. This battle will require more than her knife skills can provide. It feels better, sturdier, but she can't tell if the demon is still lurking around. She'll have to be far more careful of herself and her emotions.
She draws magic out of her mind and makes it real, settles her shield over herself with a mental sigh of relief. She hadn't realized how vulnerable going without her shield had felt.
Marian looks up, meeting Eirik's eyes. "You don't have to do this," she says, grasping for any chance...
"For the Risen Lady!" he cries, and the villagers attack.
Even this fight doesn't take very long, and when it's done, Marian stoops down and closes Eirik's eyes. They'll have to stoke the pyres before they leave if they don't want the bodies to attract demons.
All of this, all of the death, and there's still no signs of Brother Genitivi. Where could he be? Could he have left? Marian sends some of her friends back down to the lower village to search again, and the rest comb the Chantry until Leliana finds a secret door set into the wall. The seam is so fine that Marian has to put her nose up to the stones to even see the edges.
"There is a switch, somewhere," Leliana says, her eyes far away as she concentrates on the picklocks in her hands. Marian watches over her shoulder, and tries not to hover. "But it's easier if I… ah!"
The door falls open two inches.