And Rise: Chapter 6
Cauthrien refused to go unarmored.
Five side-streets from where they had faced down the ghouls, Cauthrien stopped Nathaniel with a sharp This way, beating a path instead for the barracks. He followed behind her with a muttered curse, though he easily kept up with her long, fast strides, her weaving in and out of streets until they hit the major thoroughfare. The moon was sinking back towards the horizon in slow increments, and its light was dimmed by clouds rolling out to the Waking Sea, the same clouds that had made it so dark in the tavern.
As she nudged open the door to the barracks, shoulder braced against it and hands easing it so the hinges wouldn't squeak, he murmured low in her ear, close enough to make her tense and remember his tongue against her skin, "Why are we here?"
She looked back to him, too close and eyes shining in the faded light. "I will not face those things again without armor. And you need a weapon."
He considered for a moment, then stepped back and let her widen the gap enough that they both could slip into the shadowed hall. She led the way down to the far end, stopping in front of a narrow door and pulling a key from her belt. With a glance down the hall to see that nobody was watching - she needed no rumors of her bringing men back to her room, not even with her position, her status, her age - she eased the door open.
She no longer held a room in the palace of her own, but she had been given the privacy of single quarters here, a narrow bed, a window, and stands for her armor and weapons. She crossed the room and set her sword aside to begin the tricky work of sliding the mail and steel on.
Nathaniel followed and touched her hands to still them.
"Let me help," he said.
"Help," she snorted, even as her skin flared warm at his touch. She lifted her hands away and he worked the buckle of her breastplate closed. "Help, when I don't even know what you are?"
"It is complicated," he said, head bowed as he worked on another clasp.
"You died eight years ago," she said, and he shook his head.
"No," he said. "… Five."
She had reached for her mail shoulder guard, but she stopped short, fingers trailing over the links. He had gone down on one knee to fasten the last latch, and she looked to him with her brown drawn together.
"You're dead," Cauthrien said, half question and half unbelieving statement.
"In a way." He lifted his gaze to her, then carefully touched her waist and pressed lightly until she turned, giving him her other side to work on. An hour before and she would not have let him so close. Ten minutes before and she would not have let him so close. But now he knelt by her feet and worked quickly, efficiently, and she could think of no reason to ease him away. "A way," he continued as he pulled a buckle tight, "that leaves me in many ways quite alive."
She took a steadying breath. "A Grey Warden?" A Grey Warden who drank blood and moved too fast, who was so much a part of the shadows she could not find him even when he crept up a staircase just behind her - the thought brought her senses back and she frowned, pulling away and reaching to do the buckles herself.
He stayed unmoving for a moment, then rose to his feet, absently tugging at the torn fabric of his doublet. His skin, blood-streaked but pale, showed beneath the slash. "If I tell you," he said, "will you tell me about my father? Anything. Anything to disprove those rumors-"
"I can't disprove them." She tugged the last strap tight, then reached for her mail. "But I can tell you the truth. Start talking, H- Nathaniel."
Nathaniel didn't say anything, turning away and walking to the window with its thick glass and its view out onto nothing. He tapped his finger against it, then touched the latch. "Eight years ago, my father sent me away as part of a bargain," he murmured, barely loud enough to hear over the rustle of steel links. "It was an exchange. His son in turn for knowledge."
That sounded all too like the Rendon she knew, and she remained quiet as she slid her mail shoulder cap on.
"They said I would be squired. That I would come home a knight. That I…" His voice trailed off, and she could hear the faintest edge of bitterness, disappointment.
But he simply shrugged. "They were lies, at any rate. I was little more than a slave. I was sent to a keep far from any Marcher city, and I was kept there in near total isolation. As far as I know, my father never received more than a pittance, more than a whispering of the secrets my captors held. I spent three years there. Three years raging and wasting away, stalking the halls and finding no doors."
"No doors, Cauthrien. Consider that. No people that I could see. Food appearing from nowhere. Sounds I couldn't find the source of. I lived a nightmare."
She was frozen, standing with the straps of her pauldron held tight between her fingers, knuckles gone white with tension. "Demons?" she asked, but it was a hollow question. Three years. She had spent a month in Drakon after the Blight, until Anora had pardoned her. A month with only morning and evening meals her contact with others. But a month was not three years, and a glimpse of a man was still a glimpse.
"I thought so, at first," Nathaniel continued. "I thought that if I could find them - if I could break through the illusion, whatever spell was cast - that I could get home. I was young then. A man grown, but still young. I passed three name days in that place, grew into what I am now, but I was young and foolish and I fought against an enemy I couldn't see.
"And then it came to me."
She slid the strap home through the buckle and cinched it tight, but she didn't reach for her gauntlets. She could only watch.
"I still don't know why it waited for so long. I don't know what it gained except my maturity. Perhaps that was all. But it came to me - the form of a woman, but not quite a woman. I still thought her a demon. But I hadn't seen a woman in three years, and she appeared in barely anything at all, took me to bed.
"I had planned on killing her. I had thought that she was the key. But the things she did-"
He faltered, hand on the window turning to a fist. He swallowed. "She drank my blood until my heart stopped, and then she brought me back in her image. And then for four more years she used me, put my broken mind back together. I was her pet, her attack dog, dependent wholly on her until the day I ran a pike through her chest and left her pinned in the yard while the sun rose. It burned her to ash.
"And then I ran. I ran to Ostwick. I learned to live without her, and I learned to live through the throbbing ache of her loss. I was finally ready to return home, to take my place by my father in spirit if I couldn't truly in flesh, when word came of the Blight, of the darkspawn attacking Denerim. Of my father's death. Of the horrors of his life. I heard tales- tales of how he had bled the country dry as sure as my mistress had done to me. Tales of how he had tortured men and women. Even stories of how he had chained you down and set his mabari upon you, Loghain Mac Tir's Dragon, to put you in your place. And I knew that could not be my father."
He turned to her, leaning his hands against the sill and staring at her through the gloom. "So tell me, Ser Cauthrien. How much of that is true, and how much will you tell a monster who lives on the blood of the living?"
Cauthrien stared at him, then turned away, reaching for her gauntlets. "That last story is not true," she said, slowly, remembering the rumors all too well. "The others- are, in their way."
"You knew him."
"More than I wished to." Her voice wavered a moment before she could steady herself, staring at the stone wall. "I faced him in an attempt to keep him from twisting my lord Loghain's mind still further. I failed. Rendon Howe took over half the gold from the country's treasury, forced me to let his supporters into the guard where they caused more havoc than the bandits and apostates flooding the city from the countryside. He kidnapped a Bann's son for no reason that I know except to gain leverage, broke his legs in five places and kept them stretched so they could not heal. He moved his bedroom to the door of his dungeons, and I have never once regretted that I did not arrive in time to save him."
She had seen his body stretched out, cut to pieces, his precious rings and trinkets spilled into his own blood, and she had not been the one to order him moved.
"That man was not my father," Nathaniel hissed, and before she could make out the soft slide of his footsteps, she felt his breath hot on her ear.Hot, from a man who should have been cold as death, but instead felt as burning as the pyre. His fingers curled around the one wrist still bared, but he did nothing else.
His breathing was ragged, pained and uneven, and he licked his lips before continuing, "My father would not have done those things."
She turned to look at him, shaking her head slowly. "He had the Couslands murdered in their home under the guise of friendship and support, Nathaniel," Cauthrien murmured. "He would have destroyed this country if it meant he gained from it. I fought him every day for nearly a year."
Nathaniel's voice was strangled, hurt and angry. "The man I knew-"
"Died long before the Blight. He rose again a monster. You should understand that."
He flinched, hand gripping impossibly tight so that she gasped from the sudden pain. And then he let go, stepping back and turning from her.
"You'll excuse me if I refuse to believe that. If I refuse to believe those rumors against a dead man-"
"I have told you the truth. That was all I promised you." She tugged her remaining gauntlet on, then took up her sword once more, grabbing a rag to wipe it down. "And should I believe your tale?"
"It's true! It's all-"
"True," she finished. "Whatever the truth, you said we needed to get to those catacombs."
He didn't respond at first, and she had to look to find him, over in the far corner, gloved fingers trailing over the polished hardwood of the bow she rarely used, the leather of her quiver. "Yes," he said, his voice flat and hollow in her ears. "There are things there to be taken care of."
"The beasts."
"The beasts," he agreed, and reached up to shed his cloak. He took the quiver from the wall, unbuckling the strap and slinging it over his shoulders. "We do all of this before the sun rises."
"Because you'll burn."
He took her bow, then turned to he with a nod.
"Yes. Because if we linger, I'll burn to so much ash. Not even a blood stain to leave for somebody to find."
A/N: Lore note! Realistically, in Thedas, vampires would more be specialized devouring corpses... but I assume none of you will mind too much that Nathaniel can be sentient and mostly the him we know.