Author's Note – Moving along. The muse is awake, but RL hasn't been good about providing corresponding time blocks. My thanks to all who have read, faved, & followed, with special shout-outs to Judy, Prince of Petersburg, ANCIENT WARRIOR, & KalenCaelli!
Hugs as usual to GenjutsuDragon for the beta!
OOO
"What happened?"
Cauthrien pulled her eyes away from the hypnotic dance of the flames to look at the woman sitting across the fire from her. Night had been well advanced by the time they had stopped after finding a swale deep enough to keep a campfire from being seen; this far south, the temperatures dipped to an uncomfortable chill after sunset, and with no blankets, a fire's warmth was a necessity.
Carver was already feverish, his face flushed and sweaty, his eyes half closed; he'd given a single, hoarse scream when Cauthrien had pulled his broken leg back into alignment, then lapsed back into a semiconscious state. She'd picked elfroot and spindleweed along the way, and after cleaning the mangled flesh as deeply as she dared, crushed the herbs into a poultice and packed the wound, then bandaged it before applying a better splint. His sister had roused him enough to drink a few sips of water, but had been unable to get him to eat. They had placed him as close to the fire as they could, then shared some of their limited supply of hardtack and dried beef before lapsing into exhausted silence.
"I … don't know," she admitted at last. "The plan was to draw the darkspawn in with the Grey Wardens and attack from behind with the reserves, but when the time came, Loghain called for us to retreat. He said that it was to keep Ferelden from being left defenseless when we were all killed, but -" She shook her head, her fist striking the turf beside her, feeling the frustrated anger rising again. "It was more than that; I could see it in his eyes. I refused; less than a score followed me, and Loghain said we would be hanged as traitors to Ferelden if he saw us again."
Hazel eyes watched her closely. "Would it have made a difference if more had followed you?"
"No." The reply required no thought. "Not even if all of them had. The darkspawn were … endless. The battle never should have been entered."
"But you still fought," Hawke observed quietly.
"I swore an oath to protect the King," Cauthrien said simply, dropping her eyes back to the fire. "I should have died before he did."
"I'm just as glad you didn't," the other woman told her. "I never would have gotten that big lug out of there without your help." The look she shot the slumbering form across the fire was affectionately exasperated, but worry shadowed her eyes. "Do you think he'll be all right?"
"If infection doesn't set in, I think so," Cauthrien replied, "but he'll likely have a limp for the rest of his life." She didn't mention the odds of avoiding infection, or Blight taint … or both.
"Well, he can blame me for that," Rhianne sighed, a hint of bitterness lacing the words. "Any brothers or sisters?" she asked, catching Cauthrien's curious glance.
"Both," Cauthrien said, "but it's been years since I've seen any of them." Not since she had left her family's farm with Loghain Mac Tir when she was fifteen. Briefly, the thought arose of returning to see what had become of them all, and perhaps warn them of the Blight, but she dismissed it quickly; her sisters would all be married, with a good chance that at least one of them had joined Natty in dying during childbirth, and if her father was still alive, he would be all too willing to mock her for her disgrace, no matter what she had achieved before her fall.
"Years, huh?" Rhianne considered this, then shook her head. "That might be a bit much, but a few weeks without listening to him bellyache about everything I do wouldn't be bad."A look of furtive guilt rippled across her face as she glanced at her brother. "Not that that's going to happen any time soon," she went on briskly.
"Lothering is the first settlement the darkspawn will reach once they leave the Wilds," Cauthrien warned her. "You won't be able to linger long once we get there."
"We won't," Hawke promised confidently. "My sister – his twin – Bethany is a right good hand at healing. She'll get him stable enough to travel, then we'll be off to Kirkwall."
"In the Free Marches?" Cauthrien had visited the city-state once, on a diplomatic visit with King Maric. It hadn't struck her as a welcoming location.
Hawke nodded. "My mother's family are nobility there." Her lips lifted into a smirk. "They had her all lined up to marry some Comte's son when she ran off with my father, a lowly traveling tinker." She leaned back, propping her hands behind her. "They disowned her, of course, but they're dead, and since her younger brother inherited everything, hopefully he'll be inclined to assist until we can get on our feet there." The defiant lift of her chin suggested that she intended any period of dependence to be short.
"A good tinker can find work anywhere," Cauthrien observed, her tone and the tilt of her head turning the statement into a query.
"That they can," she agreed. "We traveled all over Ferelden. Unfortunately, my father died two years ago, while we were in Lothering, and while I'm a decent hand at the trade, I don't care to make it my life's work." Her tone was flippant enough, but a protective mask descended over her face, hiding any emotion. "But I'll do what I need to do."
"It's a long journey to Kirkwall; do you know how you'll go?"
"We hadn't gotten that far before Carver and I left for Ostagar," Hawke replied with a grimace. "To tell the truth, I don't think any of us really thought it would come to that. Darkspawn in the Wilds?" she rolled her eyes. "Had to be someone either exaggerating or imagining, right?" Her smile took on a bitter cast. "If only."
"If only," Cauthrien echoed, remembering the boisterous energy that had infused the troops on the march down, and Cailan's blithe assurances to them that there would be 'Glory for all!'.
"You could come with us."
Cauthrien looked up in surprise. The words had been spoken with a studied casualness, but the hazel eyes were serious.
"I … don't know." Leaving Ferelden with a Blight on the doorstep … it seemed cowardly, but if she stayed, would she even be allowed to fight?
"I could use your help," Hawke said candidly. "Even after Carver's leg heals up enough to walk, he's going to be at a disadvantage in a fight, and darkspawn aren't the only things to worry about. Getting Bethany and Mother across country and then on a ship to Kirkwall ..." She trailed off, then snorted. "Let's just say that I'd welcome someone to take a shift on watch so I can shut my eyes."
Cauthrien needed no further explanation. There would be bandits and slavers looking to profit from the coming chaos, and to such predatory eyes, women were simply a commodity to be claimed and used or sold. "I'll think about it," she conceded. There was honor in such an endeavor, and she could always return to Ferelden once she had seen them safely to their destination. "For now, let's just focus on getting to Lothering."
"Fair enough," Hawke agreed affably. "We might not even get that far, right?" The words were insouciant enough, but the glance that she turned toward Carver was full of worry. She rose and crouched beside her brother, placing a hand on his brow and frowning slightly. "I'll take first watch," she said, settling to the ground at his side.
Cauthrien didn't argue; years as a soldier had given her the ability to sleep almost anywhere, but it felt as though she had barely drifted off when she was being shaken awake.
"Listen," Rhianne hissed, wide eyes turned up toward the heavy clouds overhead, one hand resting on the hilt of a dagger.
Cauthrien stayed motionless, ears straining, and over the rustle of the wind through the trees and grass, she heard it:
A low, rhythmic sound, like a banner snapping in the breeze. Or sheets blowing on a clothesline.
Or the flapping of immense wings.
She sat up slowly, reaching for the Summer Sword and easing it from its scabbard as she shifted into a crouch.
"What is it?" Hawke breathed. Cauthrien shook her head; she'd encountered giant spiders, wolves, bears, even a bereskarn, but this was outside her experience. The wings making that sound were bigger than the largest eagle she'd ever seen.
Archdemon? It was said that the most powerful of the darkspawn took the shape of a dragon, but nothing like that had been reported in the weeks at Ostagar. Another dragon? The current Age had supposedly been named due to sightings of high dragons in Orlais and Nevarra at the close of the Blessed Age, but they had never been seen south of the Frostback Mountains.
But what else could it be? Surely nothing good.
Carver groaned softly, mumbling in his fever dreams, and Hawke scrambled back to his side, soothing him to silence. They remained motionless, both of them scarcely daring to breathe, listening as the sound overhead gradually faded away. They had no chance to relax, however, before their straining ears caught the sound returning. Again, it seemed to hover over them for an eternity, unseen above the clouds, before once more moving away. Then back again. And again.
Cauthrien lost track of time as the unseen beast circled above. After the third pass, she and Hawke scraped dirt over the fire, hoping that it was the heat and light that was the draw, but it continued to return, sometimes low enough that a massive shape almost broke through the clouds, but always lifting back up before anything beyond immense size could be confirmed.
There was no sleep for either of them, even after the sound faded away for the last time; they didn't dare rekindle the fire, huddling together over Carver. It was a cold and miserable night, and Cauthrien was more than ready to be up and moving as soon as dawn advanced enough to let her get her bearings. Carver remained febrile and semiconscious, groaning and resisting feebly as his sister tried to get him to swallow a bit of water, but while his leg remained swollen, it did not seem to be infected, and there was no sign of the dark spiderwebbing of blood vessels that were the first manifestation of blight taint.
The wilds felt strange; on the march in, while the fauna had kept well clear of the army, they could still be seen, albeit at a distance, and heard. Today, the air was still, with no cries of birds, no rustling in the underbrush, no splashes as some creature dove into one of the frigid pools of brackish water that dotted the landscape. The passage of the army hadn't previously so cowed the fauna; was it the darkspawn or the airborne monstrosity that had silenced them now?
They saw signs of the passage of the retreating Fereldan forces: trampled grass, a scattering of discarded gear, a couple of dead bodies of those that had been given mercy after developing the blight taint. Twice they came upon executed men hung from scrubby trees so short that the toes of the lifeless corpses nearly scraped the ground. Cauthrien wondered what their crimes had been. Theft? Desertion? Or perhaps pointing out that the entire army, including its general, had committed treason by leaving their King to die.
"Poor bastard," Rhianne murmured as Cauthrien checked the body of the second one, finding a small pouch of dried healing herbs that the executioners had missed, and a few coppers in the heel of one boot. It felt ghoulish, but the dead man had no further use for any of it. "Figure he told Loghain something he didn't like to hear?"
"Maybe." Cauthrien swallowed against the rise of bile. Two days ago, such a notion would have been unthinkable, and she would have vociferously defended her mentor and commander, but it could well have been her with a noose around her neck and her eyes bulging sightlessly while carrion birds circled ever lower. It might still be her, if they encountered Loghain on their way out of the wilds.
Hawke regarded her closely. "Sorry," she offered as they again lifted the front of Carver's litter.
Cauthrien shook her head. "No need to apologize," she replied quietly. "It's as likely true as not."
A soldier's life frequently required short sleep, and while Cauthrien was aware of the fatigue from the previous night's fearful vigil, she could ignore it. Hawke was not faring so well; her steps were slower, requiring the taller woman to shorten her stride even further to match her pace, and she stumbled – occasionally at first, but with increasing frequency as the day wore on.
"Damnation!" she gasped as she fell to one knee. The jolt made Carver cry out, and Cauthrien carefully lowered her side of the litter.
"Let's rest for a bit," she suggested, casting an appraising eye upward. The slate grey cloud cover overhead was beginning to churn with darker shades, touched with purples and greens, backlit by fitful bursts of lightning, and the wind brought with it the scent of rain.
Hawke followed her gaze, then shook her head. "We need to find shelter," she insisted stubbornly, trying to rise on trembling legs.
Cauthrien put a firm hand on her shoulder. "A quarter hour, no more." They could risk no longer; spring storms in the Korcari Wilds could be savage, with high winds, driving rain, and hail as large as a man's fist. She glanced around, her gaze settling on a line of trees to the west. A river, perhaps, or more of the fens that spread across the terrain. "Wait here," she told Hawke, nodding toward her destination. "I'm going to scout that out."
Without waiting for a response, she set out at a lope. With luck, the trees were tall enough, or close enough together, to provide some kind of shelter. The wind was beginning to rise, bending the dead grass low and rattling through the branches of the brush. She lengthened her stride and in spite of the situation, enjoyed the sense of freedom that running always gave her. As a child, she'd been able to outpace even boys one or two years her senior, but more importantly, it had been something that she could do alone, something that could take her away from her father's crowded farmhouse and the endless chores that she was assigned whenever Conal MacLean noticed his too-tall daughter.
She was close enough now to see that the trees lining the banks of the water would provide marginal shelter, but something further up the bank caught her eye, and she turned aside to investigate.
It was a fisherman's hut, small but seemingly well kept, the door standing ajar. She slowed as she approached, calling out, receiving no response. She peered through the door: it was a single, windowless room with a fireplace and a narrow bedframe against one wall. Whoever the occupant had been, they had taken everything with them when they left, but the four walls and thatched roof would provide the desperately needed shelter, and sufficient wood was stacked beside the hearth to warm them through the night.
Turning, she sprinted back toward Rhianne and Carver as the first fat drops of rain hit her face, evolving into a downpour by the time she reached them. Hawke was seated beside her brother's litter, holding her cloak over his head.
"I found shelter," Cauthrien gasped out as she staggered to a halt. "We need to move."
Hawke nodded and rose slowly, taking up one side of Carver's litter, but she stumbled before they had gone more than a hundred yards.
"I'll get it," Cauthrien told her. It was awkward, as the ropes had been rigged to account for the differences in their height, but she threw herself forward with a grunt, and the litter slid along in her wake. Rhianne tried to keep up, but even without the burden of the litter, her gait was unsteady.
"Almost there!" Cauthrien glanced back, worried about the widening gap between them, but she couldn't carry both the siblings and she dared not slow down. The rain was coming harder, the wind gusting hard enough to push her sideways, and the roiling clouds overhead had taken on a green cast that she knew well.
The first hailstones began hitting the ground around her when she was only a few yards from the door, and she felt her heart sink at the sight of balls of ice the size of walnuts slamming into the turf. Behind her, she heard Hawke cry out in pain; a hailstone hit the point of her left shoulder, denting the pauldron as effectively as a mace and nearly taking her to her knees. Another hit her helmet with a force that would have knocked her out, had her head been bare. She redoubled her pace, hauling the litter into the hut, then turning to race back out to help Hawke cover the last few yards.
Both of them had taken multiple hits by the time they made it into the shelter, though plate and chain absorbed the damage better than leather. Cauthrien remained upright long enough to close the door and drop the latch before sprawling on the dirt floor beside the siblings. She lay in the darkness for several minutes, listening to the rain and the hail rattling against the sides of the hut, then rolled to her hands and knees to crawl to the fireplace. In the faint light admitted by the cracks around the door, she shaved tinder and kindling off of one of the cut logs, got a fire started in the hearth, and added wood, watching until the flames took hold in the logs.
"Maker, that feels good," Hawke groaned, turning onto her side and squirming closer to the dancing flames. Whoever had built the hut had been meticulous about chinking the cracks with mud and moss, and the interior was warming quickly, which made being soaked to the skin a bit more bearable.
"Anything broken?" Cauthrien asked her.
"Doesn't feel like it," the scout replied, flexing her arms and legs cautiously. "Gonna have a few bruises, though, even with the armor." She rolled abruptly to crawl to her brother, looking him over worriedly. Cauthrien moved to the other side of the litter.
"Doesn't look like he took any hits to the head, at least," she murmured. There were a few welts that were starting to color up on the skin that was visible, but a bit of prodding didn't reveal any obvious broken bones.
Hawke snorted. "Too bad. That's the hardest part of him." Her smirk was at odds with the gentle way that she smoothed Carver's damp hair away from his forehead. "He's burning up!" she exclaimed, drawing back her hand with a hiss.
"I think I saw some willow trees along the bank," Cauthrien told her. "I'll check in the morning. The bark, brewed into a tea with the herbs we found, should help."
Rhianne looked skeptical. "What are we going to brew tea in?"
Cauthrien slipped her helmet off and began pulling out the padding, thinking ruefully of the small tin pot in her compact mess kit left behind in Ostagar. "I can't vouch for the taste," she said wryly, "but it should hold up to the heat well enough." She moved to the door, opening it carefully and propping her helmet upside-down against the wall beside the door to catch what rain it could.
Rising to her feet, she lifted the baldric that supported the Summer Sword over her head, then leaned the scabbarded blade against the wall beside the fireplace. Taking off her armor piece by piece, she set it near the hearth to dry, draping the padded gambeson over the foot of the bedframe. Hawke watched her briefly, then did the same.
They ate in weary silence, and Cauthrien resolved to try her luck at fishing the next morning once the storm had passed. A hot meal that didn't have to be gnawed into submission would boost morale and conserve their food supply for the remainder of their trek. She retrieved her brimming helmet and managed to tip the collected water into their skins without losing too much, then set it back out to catch more.
Her sleep was blessedly undisturbed, save for the need to tend the fire periodically. The tiny shack shook from the force of the wind and rain, but it held together, and after several hours, the sounds of the storm faded. When Cauthrien woke to see the silvery light of early dawn beneath the door, she rose quietly. Carver was still feverish, but did not seem to have deteriorated; she checked his leg, and was pleased to see that the swelling had gone down a bit, though the torn flesh still looked ghastly. She changed the bandage and rose, looking toward Hawke, who had not stirred; the other woman was facing the fireplace, but was still huddled up as though cold, and Cauthrien could hear the faintest wheeze in her rapid breathing.
She slipped out of the shack, turning over the possibilities in her mind and not liking them. If Hawke became too ill to travel on her own, Cauthrien couldn't pull both her and Carver, but the shack offered another option: catch extra fish, cook or dry them, and leave Rhianne at the shack with food and water. Cauthrien could get Carver to Lothering, then return for his sister.
The sky remained overcast, but the clouds were no longer roiling, and the air was still, with a layer of fog eddying lazily about knee-height. Behind the shack, she found a short dock extending out into the water, as simply and sturdily built as the house had been. She always carried hooks and weighted line in the pouch on her belt; foraging on scouting expeditions meant carrying less food, and the line could be used for either fishing or snares. She found a sapling to use as a pole, and as the rain had driven the worms to the surface, finding bait was a task requiring only a few minutes of shallow digging with a stick.
She sat at the end of the dock, her bare feet dangling in the cool water. She tied a length of twig into the line to serve as a bobber, then cast out and settled in to wait. It was relaxing in a way: another solitary pursuit of her youth, and one that her father did not object to, so long as she returned with a good catch … which she generally did. However, the preternatural stillness from the previous day continued; no birds in the air or water, no rustling of animals creeping through the rushes … even the frogs were silent. It made her wonder uneasily how long it would be before the darkspawn reached this place; if she did have to leave Hawke here, she would need to move swiftly to reach Lothering and return.
Fortunately, the fish had not joined the exodus, and after an hour's time, she had half a dozen fat trout strung on a forked stick. As she stepped off of the dock, she spotted a stand of cattails and waded out to collect an armful; the roots and smaller leaves would be a good addition to the fish.
As she was splashing back, she saw Hawke stagger to the corner of the cabin and lean against it, retching violently. Dropping the cattails on the bank, she ran for the scout. "What's wrong?"
"Don't." The scout warned her off with an outstretched hand, the fall of her dark hair obscuring her face as she gagged again, bringing up only foamy spittle. "It's not safe."
The muffled words sent a chill of foreboding through Cauthrien that deepened to ice when Hawke lifted her head to reveal the faint but unmistakable dark veins tracing their way along her temples and neck.
She was blight-tainted.
