"Like Carrion Men"


3.

"Aud Aeducan, by the Maker," Alistair said, in the silence that followed her departure, clearly shaken. "Well. This seems likely to be a problematic... problem."

"I see no problem." Morrigan cut a leg off the rabbit, shrugged. "And if a problem comes, why then, we shall kill it." A thin, cold smile, as she wrapped the cut meat in a cloth and laid it aside. "T'will be good practice, do you not think?"

"Witch," Alistair said, tiredly, without malice.

"That would be my mother."

Lelianna stared after Aud's trail. "These Orzammar nobles... by the Maker's mercy, even a murderer could not deserve the kind of death the darkspawn give! To condemn an innocent -"

"Are you so sure she's innocent, Lelianna?" The pale cloudlight combined with firelight to throw Alistair's sharp cheekbones into high relief. His eyes were shadowed, doubtful. "The thing's I've heard about Orzammar politics... they aren't pretty. We only have her word she didn't kill Prince Trian."

"I knew you were a fool." Savagely efficient, Morrigan cut the rabbit into quarters with her knife. "But you have obviously lost what little intelligence you may once have possessed if you begin to distrust our fearless leader now. There is no point in it. We are already committed to our quest, and whether you wish it or no, whether your little dwarf friend is guilty or no, we cannot avoid Orzammar. Or would you be a coward as well as a fool?"

"Oh, Maker!" Lelianna, exasperated, swatted Alistair when he made to reply. "Do not be such children! Squabbling will not help us, yes? Let us eat, and then, if Aud has not returned, one of us will follow her."


A rotten pine had fallen, taking a neighbour with it, and left a clearing of bare pine needles wide enough for a full-grown human to take ten paces before running into a facefull of branches. A light breeze brought the breath of snow from the high reaches, a clean counterpart to dusty granite and warm leaf-rot. Aud was no Dalish elf, to love wild places and the things that dwelt there, but she had found more peace in the wilderness, even in the midst of slaughter, than she'd ever known in Orzammar's stone halls.

She drew her twin swords and started to practice forms on the uneven ground. She needed to find calm. Composure. Walking into Orzammar would be hard enough without doing it with an unsettled mind.

I, the exile, meaning to return. Ancestors, what kind of fool am I?

One with no choice, of course. Her ancestors would have understood that: the honour of the dwarves lay in keeping your given word to the letter, and dying on your feet.

Which left plenty of room for intrigue and betrayal like the one that'd ruined her. If she'd been harder, less honourable - if she hadn't waited for Trian or Bhelen to move first and prove their intent -

She might be queen in Orzammar now, and have to deal with the hidebound bastard deshyrs of the Assembly. Not to mention the rest of her family, on whom she could never afford to turn her back. At least the darkspawn were honest about trying to kill you. And killing them was less work, on the whole, than cajoling the deshyrs into making a decision.

It was why she'd never even been tempted to arrange an "accident" for Trian, pompous irritating bastard that he'd been. Let him have the Assembly: she'd have been happy with a command to lead into the Deep Roads. Reclaim some of the thaigs, or at least some of their relics, for the dwarven people: glory and honour and if she'd managed it right, she might've convinced the Assembly to make her a Paragon. Far better than a queen.

Bhelen, though. His had been an admirably neat plot. I should've killed him the first time he tried to bribe Gorim away from me.

Far too late for regrets.

Aud drove herself through the swordforms until sweat soaked the gambeson under her drakeskin scale and her breath rasped, painful, in her throat. When her forearms trembled hard enough that she had to stop or risk dropping the blades, she grounded the points, leaned on the hilts, and turned to face her watcher. "You look cold," she said, when she had breath enough to speak.

Lelianna hugged her arms around her under her cloak. The bard had been standing there half an hour, at least, and Aud - feeling a little guilty - tossed her her own from where it lay on the fallen pine. "Thank you," Lelianna said, and draped it around her slender shoulders. A hesitation. "My friend... We will stand with you, yes? Even should Orzammar shut its doors in our faces."

"They're more likely to throw me back down into the Deep Roads."

"Do you truly expect that?"

"Really?" Aud shook her head. "But then, I didn't expect it the first time, and depending on how Bhelen stands with the Assembly, he might want me safely dead and unable to avenge myself on him. Which would be sensible of him." Grimly: "I mean to, if I can. I owe it to Gorim, and to Trian. And even to my father, ancestors rot his bones."

Lelianna was silent for a long moment. When she spoke, it was soft, hesitant. "What was it like? Orzammar?"

"Ugly." Aud sank down onto the fallen pine. "Oh, the architecture is very grand. Beautiful. Overwhelming. Dwarves know stone and metal: it's in the blood. And the best of our best have been improving Orzammar's halls since the first Blight. But by the Stone, it's rotten inside. Orzammar eats its children. We lose more from the castes to the surface with every generation. Those who stay are obsessed with status. With tradition. And the deshyrs... I swear, pointless blood feuds have killed more of us than the darkspawn ever did."

"You didn't like it there?"

"I survived it," Aud said, bitterly, and exhaled. "No. I loved it, the way you can only love your home. In the full knowledge of all its flaws and vices and ancestors know, they're many. But by the Stone, when you stand on the rim of the Diamond Quarter and watch molten rock steam in the crack of the chasm so many miles below -" Her cheeks were wet. She wiped her eyes, annoyed at herself. She said, more softly, "Even if Bhelen hadn't arranged to have me condemned, Orzammar would have eaten me too, eventually. I was too good at the game. In the end, I'd have had an 'accident' at one of my brothers' hands, or become one of the deshyrs I despised, too puffed up with my own pride to look at the world outside."

"I would," Lelianna said, unwontedly serious, "be sorry not to have known you."

"Thank you," Aud said, and looked up to meet her eyes. "I only hope you can still say the same tomorrow night."


Aud didn't flinch when the guard at the gate called her exile, though the temptation to put a sword through his sneer made her fingers twitch. The Captain of the Guard called her kinslayer, and her stomach twisted into tight knots of shame, but she didn't flinch. When Harrowmont's second all but accused her of being Bhelen's spy, she gritted her teeth and kept her hands carefully away from her weapons, and still she didn't flinch.

It took the barkeep at the tavern looking at her like shit on the bottom of a Dust Town boot to break her. "A room?" the sour, narrow little woman - short even for a dwarf - said, dubiously. "I don't want no kinslayers under my roof - even if you are a Grey Warden."

Aud clenched her fists. She had her pride. She would not kill this stupid daughter of a darkspawn and a diseased pig. She would not let anyone see her weep, or lose her composure even by a hair. She hadn't lost her composure when she'd learned she was to be executed, for the Stone's cursed sake. She wouldn't lose it now.

She would not.

"Fine," she said, and heard her voice crack humiliatingly on the single syllable. Ice. She would be ice. "Alistair. Morrigan. Lelianna. I am sure this good woman has no objection to you sleeping in her beds and bathing in her water. You stay here. I will find somewhere else."

A shack in Dust Town, maybe. Tired as she was, the thought of a corner she could wedge herself into and sleep with her swords braced across her knees almost made her weep - she hadn't had a proper bath since Redcliff, and she hadn't slept in a proper bed since before Ostagar, neither the Circle of Magi nor Redcliff Castle being oversupplied with either as a result of their troubles. A pallet on the floor was a lot better than a blanket in the woods, but -

She severed that train of thought before it could hurt any worse, and stalked out of the tavern before her companions could protest.


Alistair followed her.

She expected the three of them had tossed a coin for it - or maybe drawn straws, since three was an awkward number for a coin toss, unless Morrigan had shrugged a shoulder and said, It is no business of mine, I'm sure, with her usual sardonic indifference. The game of who's going to talk to the prickly little homicidal maniac this time? had a familiar rhythm.

She was sitting with her back to a wall at the edges of Dust Town when he caught up, watching a handful of casteless tossing dice listlessly in the shadow of a doorway. The bindings of her swordhilts cut into her palms. She could close her eyes and sleep - she'd wake if she were threatened: she'd had enough practice at light sleeping under her father's roof and in the Deep Roads even before this last year - but the hollow ache under her chest left her feeling light and brittle and not quite all there. It was a disturbing sensation.

Anger had kept her on her feet, those first few weeks after her exile. Anger, and the hard, cold pride of the Aeducans - it might no longer be her name, but it was still in her blood - that would be damned if anyone saw her break.

And after Ostagar, she'd duty, too. A bleak, doomed, thankless duty, but just because the world was ending didn't mean you didn't pick up your damn pack and soldier. Alistair looked to her. So did the others, fractious as they were. You didn't let your people down.

She wasn't angry anymore. Just tired. So blighted tired.

Pick up your pack and soldier, soldier.

"Alistair," she said, when it seemed he was just going to stand there and stare at her uncertainly in the dim red light. "Problem?"

"Um," he said. "Er."

"That's not an answer."

"Ah. Well." And, all at once: "Well, you see, after you left, Morrigan persuaded the tavernkeeper to offer you a room, too. We thought you'd like to sleep in a bed tonight, so I came to find you."

Aud's eyebrows climbed into her hairline. "Morrigan?"

Alistair grinned, uncomfortable and embarrassed. "Well, I guess threatened is probably a better word than persuaded, but I promise, I wouldn't really have let her burn the place down, honest. But she was looking very, well, Morrigan, and if you don't come back I really think she will." Hopefully: "Please?"

Morrigan. Well.

"I know you don't trust her much," Aud said, and heaved herself upright. "But by the Stone, Alistair. I think I like her. Lead on, my prince. I could really use a bath."