Denerim

Market District

The city watch patrolled the market in pairs, moving with the particular confidence of men who knew nothing bad would happen to them. Emma clocked them immediately. Medium armor. Good steel. Bored posture of the genuinely comfortable.

Alistair had been watching them too.

“Noble bastards,” he said, not quite under his breath.

She looked at him. He was looking at the nearest pair like they’d personally wronged him.

“They give you that slot,” he continued, voice going peculiarly flat, “acknowledging you exist but don’t actually do anything with you. Like storing something in a room you don’t use.” He paused. “I spent ten years in a monastery that felt like that room.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m here,” he said, with the cheerfulness of someone who’d decided the alternative was worse. He shouldered the ash warrior’s axe and added with intended irony, “A Grey Warden. And it’s fine. Totally fine. I’m fine.”

He kinda was, she thought. More or less. The resilience lived right next to the wound, the way scar tissue runs alongside nerve.

Morrigan had located a cartful of dried goods and was inspecting it with skepticism, her torn neckline and general aura of unconcealed power making the merchant sweat. Emma was aware that she, herself, did not look like a humble traveling companion. The robes were gold-trimmed Tevinter silk, stripped off a blood mage in the worst room of the Circle Tower. They said: I saw what they do to mages. I took the coat.

She could feel the eyes of the city watch when they passed.

“Could you have picked something less visible,” Alistair murmured, not quite a question.

“I had limited options.”

“You could have not taken the dead blood mage’s fancy robe.”

“And worn what,” she said. “My Circle uniform?”

He grumbled. The Circle uniform had not survived. Little had survived. They were all wearing, in one way or another, the evidence of what had happened to them.

Leliana moved through the crowds with the practiced ease of someone who had been in and out of a great many places without being invited. She’d vanished into the chantry’s outer colonnade ten minutes ago, and returned now with a satisfied expression and a clink in her bag.

“Perpetua had two lyrium potions in the most obvious place,” she said pleasantly. “Right there in the vestibule. Practically in a dish.”

“You stole from a chantry sister,” Alistair said.

“I borrowed, in a moment of need. Besides”—she tilted her head—“a templar had another one under the bench in the antechamber. So we’re well-provisioned.” She smiled. “I left a candle lit.”

“For the templar?”

“For everyone.” She looked genuinely serene. “It’s the thought.”

Morrigan said nothing. Her neck had been a ruin this morning and she moved now with the precise deliberateness of someone redistributing agony into something she could work with.

Emma’s own skull was a dull specific pressure, like something lodged behind one eye. Alistair had a matching one, acquired separately, and they’d discussed it briefly over camp with the particular exhausted honesty of people who’ve run out of other things to talk about.

“It comes and goes,” he’d said.

“It comes,” she’d agreed.

Ser Landry

He appeared from near the fountain—older, red-faced, carrying himself with the moral certainty of a man who’d already decided how this conversation ended.

“I recognize you.” He stopped in front of Emma and then redirected toward Alistair, which she was used to. “From Ostagar. Andraste’s blood, you’re a Grey Warden.” His voice had the carrying quality of someone accustomed to being obeyed across distances. “Duncan’s apprentice. You killed my friend and good King Cailan. I demand satisfaction, ser.”

Alistair just sighed, then slammed down the visor of his helm. The man blinked. It was not the response he’d planned for.

“The charges against the Wardens are false,” Emma said.

“So you would compound slander on top of treason?” He rounded on her, now, which was its own kind of answer. “You dare smear Teyrn Loghain’s word?”

“Loghain abandoned his king to die. Think, man. Wardens wouldn’t help the darkspawn.”

“We’re very much against darkspawn,” Alistair said. “That’s sort of the whole thing. The core of it, really.”

Ser Landry squinted at them. The weapon stayed sheathed.

“I do not like your tone, ser.” He said it with less heat than he’d started with. “But you may be right. I may regret this.” He straightened, as if returning to a posture he’d left. “I cannot duel someone who may be guiltless. Leave, Warden. If I find proof, we will meet again.”

He walked off the way he’d come, with the stiff dignity of a man renegotiating something he thought was already settled.

Leliana said, brightly, once he was around the corner: “That went well!”

Alistair turned to look at her.

“Did it?” he said. “I feel like I need to lie down.”

“You were very restrained,” said Leliana.

“I was so restrained. I was the most restrained person on this entire street.”

Sister Theohild

The chantry smelled like beeswax and old stone and the particular anxious quality of prayer in places that have seen too much of what it doesn’t fix. A sister and Mother near the front. The Mother sat with her hands folded. The other—older, small, absolutely certain—was leading the Chant of Light from a lectern, loudly, and incorrectly.

“The one who repents, who has faith unshaken by the darkness of the world, and roasts not over the misfortunes of the weak—”

“Boasts,” said the Mother, with the weariness of someone who had made this correction many times. “It’s ‘boasts,’ Sister. Not ‘roasts.’”

“Hmm.” She returned to the page. “She shall know the peas of the Maker’s benediction—”

“Peace, Sister. Peace.”

“The Veal holds no uncertainty”—she raised her voice slightly, as if volume would resolve the matter—“for the Maker shall be her bacon and her shield—”

“There’s no Veal in the Chant!” Mother Perpetua, unawares of the missing lyrium that had until recently been under her bench—pressed her hands together. “You’re doing this on purpose, aren’t you?”

Emma said, “I like her version better.”

Alistair started laughing, a little unprepared for that admission. “Me too.” He watched Sister Theohild continue, serene and incorrect, through the next passage. “No one ever taught me that when I was a templar.”

“Pedagogical failure,” Emma said.

“Bacon and shield,” Alistair repeated. “Actually, that’s—that’s better. Bacon is a protection against the world.”

“A very meaty theology,” Emma said.

“Exactly. I could have gotten behind that.”

Next: Dirty Laundry