Jowan frowned as he peered into a cabinet full of glass flasks, then took one down and poured some of its contents into a cup, re-corking the flask and closing and cupboard before carrying the cup over to Alistair. "Here, drink this," he said.
Alistair accepted the cup, and peered into it, sniffing suspiciously. There was a strong herbal odour, and he could see flecks of vegetation floating in the murky yellow-green liquid within. "What's this supposed to do?" he asked.
"Help with the aftereffects of alcohol abuse," the mage said. "If I'd known to I would have brought some along with us, but Loghain neglected to mention your expected condition until we were already at sea. It should settle your headache and nausea, and help you to sleep better, among other things."
"Oh. Thanks," Alistair said, and drank it. He half-expected it to taste like swamp-water, but it was actually... rather pleasant. A little mouth-puckeringly bitter at first sip, and then the flavour mellowed out. He drank all of it and handed the cup back. Jowan put it aside, then waved at a nearby door. "There's a bath through there, as well as toiletries which you're welcome to use. You should be feeling properly hungry again by the time you've washed and changed."
Alistair glanced toward the door into the room, where Cale and Edrick were standing guard to either side of it, looking bored. He felt reasonably certain that turning down the offered bath would be pointless. Doubly so once he considered how vile he felt; his last bath involving anything more than a wipe with a salt-water-dampened cloth had been back in Kirkwall, over a week ago, and he was feeling more than a little sticky. Not to mention fragrant. Especially after several hour both today and the day before on horseback, and sleeping in his clothes the night before. So he gratefully accepted the stack of clean clothing they'd picked up at the quartermaster's store on the way here, and took himself off into the bathing chamber.
It was a rather nice room, the walls lined to the height of his shoulder with pale-coloured glazed tile, and floored in green-blue slate, with a drain to carry away any overflow from the tub. The tub was a big hammered copper affair, with real dwarven plumbing, and he happily started it filling before stripping out of his filthy clothing. A shelf near the tub held a partially used bar of soap – nice stuff, smelling of herbs, not like the cheap bars of brown lye soap he usually used. With the aid of a water jug from a stand near the small window – little more than a glassed-in arrow slit in size, nothing he could possibly escape by even if they hadn't been several floors up – he poured water over himself several times to rinse off the worst of the dirt before finally climbing into the tub.
The water was a murky grey by the time he'd washed his hair and scrubbed himself from head to toe, and he was starting to feel considerably better; whatever was in that herbal concoction the mage had given him seemed to be doing its job, at least. He rose from the tub, pulling the plug so it could drain, the water running across the floor and disappearing down the inset drain. He quickly towelled himself mostly dry, before wrapping the towel around his waist. There was a razor among the things on the wash stand, and a shaving brush, and a small mirror fastened to the wall beside the window. He soon had his chin and cheeks lathered up, and carefully removed the scraggly beginnings of a beard that over a week without shaving had given him.
By the time he'd finished drying, combed out his damp hair, and changed into the provided clothing – leggings of dark blue cloth and a tunic of light grey, with a griffon outlined in blue embroidery on the left breast, with stockings and soft indoor shoes – he was feeling pretty good. At least until he considered what all this was leading up to; formal court. That sent his mood crashing back down. He was likely going to be brought up on charges of desertion, he found himself glumly thinking, and it wasn't like he could claim that wasn't what he'd done. He had deserted, run away in the face of the enemy, and not just some all-too-common darkspawn enemy, but an Archdemon, what the Grey Wardens had been formed to kill in the first place. Their reason for existence, when you got right down to it.
And Solona had died, killing it.
He stood there for a very long time, just staring blankly at the wall, until a knocking on the door roused him.
"Are you okay in there?" Jowan called through the door. "You're being awfully quiet."
"Yeah..." he started to call back, and had to stop and clear his throat when his voice cracked. "Yeah, I'm fine," he continued. "I'll be right out."
He looked around the messy room, feeling far more sober – in both body and in mood – than he had in ages. He looked at the pile of filthy clothing discarded on the floor, then picked up the damp towel and wrapped it around them to make a neat bundle, which he left beside the door. The tub was empty, the soap back where it belonged, the shaving brush rinsed and standing on end to dry. He picked up the razor, staring at it for a long minute, then slowly folded it shut and put it away as well.
Lunch was eaten in Jowan's room, at a small table positioned under the window. Judging by its scarred and stained surface it doubled as a workbench for the mage. Edrick joined the two of them at the table; Cale had vanished off somewhere. Judging by Edrick's own freshly washed-and-changed appearance, Alistair guessed the pair were taking it in turns to freshen up from their journey as well.
His appetite was back enough for him to make substantial inroads on the meal before them – a thick soup, bread, and cheese, with a cobbler made of stewed dried pears and raisins for dessert. Edrick took equally large servings, though Jowan, surprisingly for a Grey Warden, took only a small serving of soup and bread, and as soon as he was finished took some clothes out of a clothes-press near the bed and carried them off into the bathroom.
"Leave Jowan some dessert," Edrick said when Alistair was serving himself a second helping of cobbler from what was left in the pan. "He's got a sweet tooth."
"All right," Alistair agreed, and put back the spoonful of it he'd been about to add to what was already in his bowl. He took his time eating, mostly lost in thought. Very circular thoughts, wandering back and forth between worries over what punishment Loghain might decide was appropriate for his crime – which could go as far as some pretty gruesome methods of death, if he'd been brought back here to be executed – to thinking about those last few days in Denerim with Solona, before she'd betrayed him. Or he'd betrayed her. Before they'd betrayed each other. The mix of fear and shame soon had his stomach feeling unsettled again; he had to force himself to each the last couple spoonfuls of the now-tasteless dessert, not wanting it to go to waste.
Surely Loghain didn't mean to execute him. If that was what he'd wanted, he could have done it just as easily back in Kirkwall; he wouldn't have even had to wake Alistair first, just drawn a sword and lopped off his head. But apart from being brought back here against his will, and forced to stop drinking, he'd been reasonably well-treated since being captured. Unless Loghain wanted to make a point and have Alistair serve as a very bad example of just what happened to deserters from the Wardens, he thought uneasily, and pushed his empty plate and bowl away. "I could kill for a tankard of ale right now," he muttered.
Edrick snorted. "Good luck with that," he said in a tone of voice that made it clear just how slight a chance he thought there was of ale being anywhere in Alistair's near future. Alistair sighed, and slouched back in his chair.
The bathroom door opened and Jowan re-emerged, his hair still damp from bathing. He resumed his seat at the table, and pulled the pan of cobbler over in front of himself, happily settling down to eating what remained directly from it. Alistair watched him, frowning slightly.
It was hard to believe this was the same mage he'd seen in the dungeons at Redcliffe; that man had been scrawny, pallid of skin, his hair long, loose and greasy, his cheeks heavily stubbled. He'd cringed away from everything – the light of their torches, their voices, any movement they made. He'd obviously been broken by his experiences in the cells. Only after he'd recognized Solona had he come near the bars, pleading anxiously with her. Alistair remembered how heart-broken her voice had sounded as she'd finally commanded Leliana to pick the lock, and told the mage to run away and never come back. Jowan had fled, flinching away from them as he scurried past them and off in the direction they'd entered, shoulders hunched as if expecting a blow. Or a knife in the back.
This man only barely resembled that one; the same face, the same pale grey eyes and faint worry-lines on his forehead, the same black hair, though merely damp now, not lank with grease, neatly barbered and braided. His skin had a healthy tan, and he sat upright, not hunched, his eyes clear and alert. Alistair flushed as he realized that Jowan had taken notice of his examination of the man as was looking curiously back at him.
"I don't know if you remember meeting me before," he found himself saying. "At Redcliffe."
"I remember," Jowan said, his voice soft and calm. "That was a bad time for me," he added, and neatly ate another spoonful of cobbler. "Not just before, but after, too. I didn't know where to go, or what to do once I got there. I was Tower-raised, you know; I'd never really been outside, until I fled. I decided to head back to the tower and turn myself in. Only I managed to get myself turned around and lost instead. I ended up wandering around in the Frostback mountains over the winter, dodging wandering darkspawn and bandits and wolves, and trying not to freeze to death. Or starve."
"How'd you survive?"
"Luck," Jowan said, and smiled crookedly. "Stumbled over a cave. Had to kill a bear to claim it for my own use, but that at least gave me warm clothing and plenty of food for a while. I looked like a Chasind barbarian by the spring; I was wearing uncured furs and thin as a rake, and half out of my mind from the fear and loneliness. I finally managed to find my way back into the lowlands; I was in the Hinterlands somewhere south-east of the lake by then, as far as I've been able to reconstruct it since. Finally came across civilization – an inhabited farm – just in time to save the farmer and his family from a darkspawn attack. They didn't want me staying around or anything, of course, but they let me bathe, traded me some food and clean clothes for the furs I was wearing, told me which way to go to get back to the lake."
He ate another couple of bites of cobbler, then smiled ruefully. "I got lost again, of course. I'm not very good at keeping track of directions. I'd start out each morning walking northwest, using the sun as my guide, and then get turned around again before noon, and not be able to sort myself out until mid-afternoon. And even then I was as likely to end up going east or northeast or north as to the northwest."
Alistair pictured Ferelden in his head, easily imagining the sort of route the mage must have wandered. "So you ended up in the Bannorn, eventually?" he hazarded a guess.
Jowan smiled, looking please. "Yes. Given my sense of direction, I'm surprised I didn't end up in the Brecilian Forest, actually. I was lucky enough to not reach Lothering until shortly after the darkspawn had abandoned it, headed off to wherever it was the Archdemon was calling them to. Denerim probably, guessing by the likely dates of when this was – I lost track of time as well as direction, I only know it was sometime in the mid to late summer by the time I reached the Bannorn. I was still trying to make it back to the Tower, but by then I'd gone so far east that I'd actually been closer to the Tower when I was still at Redcliffe. At least in the Bannorn I could usually find other people, and work for food or shelter – I learned how to do a lot of basic farm chores, like feeding chickens and turning the soil in fields. Weeding. Milking cows and goats. Chopping wood. That sort of thing. I'd work long enough to get food to last me a few days, maybe a few coins, and then move on again."
He scraped the last of the cobbler out of the pan, ate it, and licked the spoon clean before putting it down. "I never did make it back to the lake, obviously, or I'd likely be a dead man by now. Or Tranquil. But most likely dead. Word came out of Denerim, about the battle... all the dead. Solona," he said, a look of sorrow crossing his face.
He fell silent, just turning his head and staring out the window for a while before finally resuming, his voice even softer than before. "She was... I didn't have many friends, growing up. Never good at making them, or keeping them. But Solona... she was my friend. Like a sister to me, if I'd ever had one. Maybe I even did; like I say, I was tower-raised. I know nothing about who my parents were, or if I had any siblings. Solona was my sister, my friend, for so many years the only person I cared about, or who cared about me. When I heard she was dead..." He paused, and shook his head.
"I don't remember much of that winter," he continued, looking back to Alistair finally. "It was better than the previous one, at least. I'd found a farm to work at through the fall harvest, and worked so hard they were willing to let me stay over the winter. And then, in the spring... the darkspawn came. It seemed all I did for weeks after that was run around killing darkspawn, rescuing people, escorting them to safety, healing the wounded when I thought I could safely do so. Eventually the Warden-Commander tripped over me; luckily for me, since some templars were on my trail by then. They caught up shortly after he'd finished questioning me about who I was and what I was up to. When they demanded he turn them over to them to be taken off and executed, he told them no and conscripted me on the spot. He doesn't think much of the chantry, you know."
"Don't you blame him for what happened to you at Redcliffe?" Alistair asked, surprised. "He hired you to poison Arl Eamon! You wouldn't have been in that dungeon if not for him."
"No, I don't blame him," Jowan said, and shrugged. "Mostly I blame me, for being so naive. Anyway, it wasn't Loghain that told me to poison the Arl," he added, then rose to his feet and began stacking empty dishes on the tray in the middle of the table.
"What!? But you told Solona it was! You said you'd been taken before him, you were sure it was him because you'd seen paintings of him, and he asked you to poison the Arl..."
"No. That's not what I said," Jowan said calmly. "I said I was only taken before him once. All Loghain said was that Arl Eamon was dangerous to the nation, and then asked for me to take the position of tutor to Connor."
"But... then why did you poison Arl Eamon?" Alistair asked, puzzled.
"Because Arl Howe ordered me to do it. He supplied the poison; he told me under what conditions I was to use it. Howe promised that if I dealt with Eamon, Loghain would settle matters with the Circle so that I could return home to the tower, afterwards. I was stupid enough to believe him. All Loghain ever wanted was a spy in the Arl's household, not an assassin. Everything else was Howe's idea. Anyway, we should get a move on – it's almost time for court."
So saying, he wiped his hands clean with a napkin, neatly folded it and set it down on the tray, then looked expectantly at Alistair. Alistair rose, and silently followed him out of the room, his two guards – Cale having returned unnoticed at some point during their lengthy conversation – trailing along behind.