Seething with an unpleasant mix of shame, frustration, and self-righteous anger, Marian is in no fit state for dealing with people. She wanders the hallways, discontent and finding fault with everything, hiding from the people she knows and ignoring the ones she doesn't.
This is juvenile and unattractive, she tells herself, but it doesn't seem to help. Instead she finds the stairs to the battlements atop the castle's retaining walls. Guards stand at regular intervals, keeping watch over the approaches, but after a quick glance, they pay her no more mind than she does them. For a long while she's content to stand just at the edge with her eyes closed. The stiff, wet wind tugs her hair out of its tie, chills her skin and cools her blood. She takes a deep, deep breath, one that smells of fish and pine and straw dust from the training dummies in the courtyard behind her...
... and then she breathes it out again, the scents of Redcliffe, her guilt and shame, her worries and fears, and even the anticipation of seeing Alistair later, of leaving Redcliffe and getting back on the road. She lets them all go. They're not relevant here. She lets her emotions run out of her like water, leaving her empty. She can't keep this up for long, she knows, for right now she's a conveniently demon-shaped hole waiting to be filled. But she needs this. She needs the peace that wide-open space can bring.
Marian opens her eyes.
There's such a spectacular view from up here. The village spreads out below her; from this height the people look like dolls, moving around, just going about their lives. The height gives her a feeling of distance, of remoteness, that suits her mood. She watches them crossing here and there with idle, disinterested curiosity for a long while before she shakes her head and looks at the lake. It's a frosty grey, reflecting the scudding clouds above, blown by a harsh wind that she can't feel. The water spreads out to the north all the way to the horizon. Normally there are small fishing boats out, even at this hour, but they must know something that she doesn't regarding the weather. She wonders whether she ought to go in... and then rejects the thought. So long as she's not being hailed on, she'd much rather stay outside.
She closes the empty place in her mind after a while, but she stays where she is, looking out over the lake like it's got the answer to all her problems. The lake takes her like that, sometimes. It'd been the thing that surrounded the Tower, the thing that kept them separate from the rest of the world, and to her the lake is a confused tangle of resentful bitterness and yearning for life outside of the Circle. But she could never seem to shake the joy she'd felt the first time she saw it, the little delighted breath she took at the way it stretches out so far, inviting her over that horizon to see what lies beyond.
She sighs. She feels better, cleaner, but she doesn't want to go in yet. She wanders the battlements, counting her steps, nodding to the few guards who greet her. Most of them have their eyes on their duty instead of her, which she prefers.
In the corner where two walls meet, there's a square bastion that Morrigan has claimed as her own. She's pitched her tent here. It's strange to think of Morrigan out here, all alone, but Marian is sure that she prefers it that way.
Now that she thinks about it properly, Morrigan has to hate it here. She's not used to people, to towns, to buildings like the castle, which press down on the soul no matter how spacious it might be. She's easier out in the world, and better yet in the woods and forests that are the closest she can get to her home in the Wilds.
Morrigan is sitting in front of her tent, her legs crossed. She's making tiny stitches in one of her boots. "Warden," Morrigan says, greeting her without looking up.
Marian sighs and settles in front of Morrigan, drawing her knees up to her chest. "Warden? I have a name, you know."
Morrigan ignores her splendidly. It's probably time to resign herself to never having a name around certain people. "Did you wish something of me?"
"Only to get away," Marian says with a dismissive shrug. Morrigan pins her with one disbelieving glance, golden eyes cool, before returning to her boot. Marian sighs. "I was in a foul mood, if you must know."
"And where is your fellow Warden?" Morrigan might as well have asked Where is your pickled slug? If only they'd stop picking at each other –
Marian sighs again. May as well wish for the moon, she tells herself. "He's training with the knights," she answers, waving her hand toward the courtyard. "Down there."
Morrigan glances at her again. "So you came to me instead?"
Marian opens her mouth, ready to tell her that she'd had no intention of coming to her, but – she could have gone anywhere else, down the village or out into the gardens, which have nothing to show off in Cloudreach. She'd found Morrigan up here once before, and subconsciously she may have been hoping to find her again.
Why, then? Marian picks her way through her own feelings. "I suppose I thought Alistair would try to make me feel better," she admits, not without some resentment. "You'll tell me to get over myself and do something about it."
Morrigan laughs. "You may be correct," she says, still amused. She sets a locking stitch into the neat line of stitches she's sewn into her boot, ties a strong knot and bites off the thread. It's a complicated mass of leather, straps, and buckles that Morrigan puts on quickly, with the ease of long practice.
"There," she says with satisfaction. She stands, stomping her foot down into her boot once, and smiles. "Now, I may have a solution."
"You don't even know the problem," Marian objects.
"Do I not?" Morrigan leans in toward Marian a little, speaks lower like she's confiding something. "Catch if catch can," she says, then twists away with a laugh – and then that twist continues, spinning her body in impossible directions, out into thin air and back again. She reforms into a crow and leaves Marian behind with one strong flap of her wings.
Marian laughs, incredulous. "So it's like that, is it?" she shouts after Morrigan, then reaches for the place in her mind where her robin lives. A robin's no match for a crow, not in speed or anything else, but it's impossible not to take up this challenge.
With the bird in the front of her mind, Marian starts to open herself to it – then notices one of the guards staring at her in horror. She shrugs and lets the robin take her, rides through the nausea as her form dissolves and reshapes itself into something new, and when she opens her eyes again the world is quite different.
Taking off from here isn't as easy as Morrigan made it look. Marian grumbles to herself as she works at it, pitting herself against the strong, wet southern wind blowing in from the lake that dampens her feathers. Morrigan is as fearless in flying as she is everywhere else, setting a brutal pace that demands all of Marian's strength in keeping up until Morrigan folds back her wings and dives.
Morrigan was right. As a bird, her emotions are – not gone, but different, muted and flickering like candlelight, easily dismissed in favor of the wind, the speed of their descent, the absolute freedom her wings grant her. Morrigan turns out of the dive smooth as silk, and Marian follows; they end up flying one above the other, like Morrigan's her silent, unnaturally large shadow.
She gives her troubles to the wind, letting them blow away, and darts down to tag Morrigan from above.
From there, they end up playing follow-the-leader for hours. Morrigan teaches her all sorts of tricks for flying in conditions like these, and even for skimming the short, choppy waves stirred up by the wind. Marian's wet all over by the time they're done, lake water dripping from the edges of her feathers, and she's tempted to shake like Cú when they land on the edge of the battlements. Morrigan just rustles her feathers a little to shake the water off, though, so Marian follows suit. It helps.
Morrigan changes back and cocks an expectant eyebrow at Marian. She's not ready to be herself again, though, so she flies a circle around Morrigan's head and leaves her with a fragment of birdsong.
But where to go now?
She crosses into the courtyard, swooping low down to the ground and flapping madly to regain some height before she runs into anything. The courtyard is empty, and the main doors are closed, so she circles around to the garden and plays in the bushes and flowers. She invents little games, she sings half-remembered skipping songs she'd taught Bethy once upon a time, she tries to write her name with birdprints in the soil...
It's been a long time since she's been this childish.
She's tired now, though, and sore right through to her bones after the unaccustomed exercise Morrigan put her through. She turns herself back to human, suffering through the nauseous twisting, takes a deep breath, and stands to go in.
Oh, Maker, she's late for dinner. She flies up to her room and stops dead when she realizes that the laundry maids have her Circle robes, which are the only thing she has that's even close to dressing for dinner.
Well, Isolde will just have to be satisfied with her Warden uniform, Marian thinks grimly, shoving herself into the leather trousers with indecent haste. Alistair wears his every night.
She's had enough practice to be quick at this by now, but even that means that she's half an hour late for dinner by the time she takes the stairs two at a time back down to the main floor and tiptoes into the main hall, hoping she can slip into a chair without everyone noticing.
Of course that means that she comes in during a lull in the conversation and everyone turns to look at her. Of course.
"Warden," Isolde says, toasting Marian with a glass of wine that's already half-empty. There's a smile on her face, the lingering traces of the laughter she'd heard coming down the stairs. "We were wondering where you were."
Wynne turns a disapproving look on Marian, and so does Irving, occupying the place of honor by Eamon's left hand. There are only two open seats left, one at the near end between Zevran and Wynne, and one next to Sten on the opposite corner. Zevran tilts his head at the empty chair next to him, smiling a faint little smile that absolutely reeks of smug superiority.
That makes her decision for her.
"Cruel woman," Zevran murmurs as she strides behind him, heading for the other empty seat. Marian ignores him. He needs his ego shrunk for him. She brushes her hand against Alistair's back on her way, soft and quick like it's an accident, but she catches his smile out of the corner of her eye as she settles into a seat on the bench next to a stocky, well-dressed man she doesn't know. Her neighbor resolutely ignores her, intent on impressing Bann Teagan with his efforts; she gathers that he's the new seneschal or quartermaster, and that Teagan had recommended him for the post.
Sten nods to her. "Warden."
Marian is going to forget her own name at this rate.
Sten's at her left, at the end of the table, and across from her sits the new Mother who oversees Redcliffe Castle's tiny Chantry, Mother Elyse. The table is wide, though, and difficult to speak across, so her conversational options are Sten and the seneschal.
Marian turns to Sten. "How have you enjoyed the castle?" she asks. But oh, the look he gives her – Marian sighs. She probably should have known better than to try small talk with Sten. She resigns herself to a very quiet dinner.
The servants bring dinner to them; on the other side of the table, Mother Elyse and Ser Perth are talking about religious theory, and Ser Perth turns out to be remarkably well versed in it. Marian can just follow the conversation through a comparison of Chantry services before the Orlesian occupation to Mother Elyse's first service two days previous. From there they backtrack to the Exalted Age, bemoaning the Divine Rosamund's decision to abolish high Chantry services for lack of enough classically trained singers to do justice to the Chant.
Marian's distracted from the conversation by movement to her left; she looks over to catch Sten rolling his eyes. She looks at him, her eyebrows a silent question, but he ignores her.
When she turns back to the only conversation she can actually make out, they're talking about Redcliffe's last harvest and whether they'll be able to get anything planted this year, with the Blight spreading through their fields. Only then does Mother Elyse seem to remember who's at dinner with them and turns the conversation aside.
No one wants to talk about the Blight with a Grey Warden. She'd call it strange, but she understands. Wardens are charged with doing something about it. What if they're made to feel like they're not doing enough? And Warden methods can admittedly be extreme to the uninitiated. No one wants to be told that their fields must be fired and salted so that nothing will grow for years, or that their husband or mother or children are lost to them.
"The Maker will provide," Mother Elyse says placidly, refilling Ser Perth's wineglass.
Sten snorts. Marian is only startled because she hadn't thought he was paying attention to the conversation anymore. Mother Elyse narrows her eyes, obviously offended; she opens her mouth to upbraid Sten, who spares her one disinterested glance before he goes back to his dinner. She purses her mouth and turns away in her seat to give Sten her shoulder.
The pointed snub doesn't faze him in the least. And why should it? Marian sighs. "Very diplomatic," she says to him.
He gives her the same disinterested glance he'd used to such effect on Mother Elyse, but she's become inured to it by now – he tries it on her every time she asks him anything about himself or about the qunari. "If she is the example of the keepers of human wisdom, your behavior makes much more sense to me now."
Marian frowns and starts to ask him what exactly he means by that, but after a glance across the table, she closes her mouth instead. She doesn't want to start the fourth Exalted March against the qunari at the dinner table. Her end is therefore quiet, more interested in their plates than talking to each other, but there's a good deal of laughter and conversation from the middle with Isolde and Eamon, and Leliana and Zevran look like they're getting along nicely now.
Marian makes her escape as soon as it's polite, rising immediately after Isolde signals for the plates to be cleared. Cú is waiting for her in her room, and it's only then that Marian guiltily realizes that he's been up here by himself all day, so she turns right back around and takes him outside into the twilight and lets him romp.
She realizes she's been suckered when he doesn't relieve himself, but by that time she's losing at tug o' war and it hardly seems important. When finally he gets serious about it, Cú rips the rope right out of her hands. She's braced so hard against the pull that when it stops so abruptly the force sends her onto her ass in the dirt, and she just sits there and laughs. He bounces around her in a circle, shaking his head and the rope triumphantly. "You are a tricksy beast, aren't you," she says to him.
He drops the soggy rope into her lap and cocks his head expectantly.
"Absolutely not," she tells him, shoving it off. "I'll throw something for you, but not that, it's revolting."
He scouts around for a little while and finds her a stick – from the smoothness of the handle, it's probably a bit of broom handle or something like that – and it only strikes her after she throws it the first time that he's got her very well trained.
She's not sure what makes her turn around to look at the door behind her, but she does. Alistair is leaning against the doorjamb, watching them.
"Are you just going to stand there?" she asks him.
Alistair makes a show of thinking about it. "I think so, yes." He grins at her. "I'm enjoying the view."
Marian rolls her eyes at him, though she's not displeased, and throws the stick again. Cú likes it when she banks it off things to make it change direction suddenly. It's entertaining to watch him scramble to follow the stick. He still catches it in the air every time, but at least now she's making him work for it.
She offers Alistair the stick. "Want a go?"
He approaches her and takes the stick, weighing it in his hand before flinging it hard end over end, spinning away into the darkness. Cú barks and tears off after it. Marian watches them disappear into the gloom, much further than any of her efforts.
"Show-off," she accuses him.
Alistair grins at her. "I have to impress you somehow," he says. "You don't seem to give a fig about the royal bastard thing."
Marian laughs. "So you thought muscles might do it instead?" She runs a thoughtful eye down Alistair's body, from head to toe. His uniform does fantastic things for him, but she can't help but picture the flickering glance she'd gotten of him naked in the Temple of Sacred Ashes, the long, lean lines of his side, his strong thigh, the way the muscles in his back flexed as he turned. She wants to put her hands on him so badly... She swallows. "It might, at that," she says, her mouth dry.
He ducks his head and kisses her, very softly, sweetly, drawing an answering sweetness out of her heart. She loves the way he touches her, like she's something precious and wanted. She's never had this kind of relationship before, nor ever taken so long to get into bed with someone, but Alistair is proving worth all the frustrated, sleepless nights.
Alistair studies her face. "Sometimes you look at me like... " Marian raises her eyebrows in silent, inquisitive interest which causes him to flush a little, for some reason. His voice drops. "Like you're hungry."
Ah. It's nice to know that he's not totally oblivious, but... "Does that bother you?" she asks carefully.
"If I thought you only liked me for my body, it would," he says, a familiar note of wry self-deprecation coming into his voice. "I'm not a side of beef."
Oh, she hates it when he talks about himself like that, like he's not confident in himself, like he doesn't see the person that he is. "I'm sexually attracted to your mind, too, if that helps," she says, giving him her best bedroom eyes. He laughs, as she'd hoped. She puts levity aside for seriousness. "I've never felt like this, Alistair. About anyone."
She touches his cheek, cupping his face in her hand; her heart flips over when he turns his cheek into her palm. There's a smug, satisfied little smile on his face that he's trying to hide. Let Alistair think he's tricked her into confessing something, if he likes; he doesn't need to know that she'd give him the world on a plate and her heart along with it, if only he asked.
She slides her arms around his neck and pushes closer, kisses him a little harder, takes a handful of his hair in her hand and holds him for her seeking mouth. He moans, and again, louder, when she tugs on his hair and kisses her hungrily.
Oh, really.
Marian smiles against his mouth. I am going to enjoy figuring you out so much. I promise you'll enjoy it, too.
Oh, she loves kissing Alistair. He doesn't really know what he's doing yet, but his mouth is so soft and tastes so good and he takes direction so well... It's easy to lose track of time with him.
And then Cú shoves his face between them to separate them, pushing Marian a step away, and proffers the stick again with a hopeful expression.
Alistair laughs ruefully. "I think I've got competition."
Marian takes the stick and flings it into the darkness, lit only by flickering fireflies, so she can show Alistair just how wrong he is.