The bridge was steeper than it looked.
That was Lothering for you. The arch pitched up at an angle that did its best, all ambition and no geometry, uneven stones shifting just enough to punish inattention. In full armor, on a body that had been run fairly hard for days, the incline registered in his calves as a personal complaint.
At the top, you got a view. Not a view, not the kind that made you stop and think about whatever. Just enough height to see Lothering laid out in all its practical misery. Crooked rooftops. The windmill dominating the sky. Carts and refugees parked variously. The river below them was narrow and slow, no enthusiasm.
People noticed you on a bridge. Lothering had decided Grey Wardens were uninteresting, which was not the same as deciding they were welcome. So he was still taking point, even in town. Behind Muffin, that is, who was already investigating the riverbank on the far side, below.
His boots hit the far bank and the world leveled out. He was, once again, someone who could be stabbed at the same elevation as everyone else. Progress.
“I have a wonder, Alistair,” said Morrigan, from directly behind him, “if you will indulge me.”
“I feel I won’t enjoy this,” he said. “But go on.”
“Of you two, you are the senior Warden here, are you not?” Morrigan said, in the particular pleasant tone she employed when she meant its opposite. “And yet, you do not behave like it.”
He looked back at Emma, following next to Leliana on the bridge. She was looking past him, her attention already out on the fields. Muffin circled back and rejoined her. She was using the elevation and reading the ground. Nothing in her posture indicated she was listening, which meant she probably was.
“I find it curious that you allow another to lead, while you follow,” added Morrigan, as he looked at her.
“You find that curious, do you?” he said.
“In fact, you defer to a new recruit. Is this a policy of the Grey Wardens? Or simply a personal one?”
“What do you want to hear?” he said. “That I prefer to follow? I do.”
“You sound,” she said, pleased about something, “so very defensive.”
Leliana was definitely looking at him now. She said something to Emma. They spoke quietly, too quietly for him to hear. That seemed fair.
“Couldn’t you crawl into a bush somewhere and die? That would be great, thanks.”
He said nothing else. The comment functioned as a door, closed firmly, with nothing visible on the other side. Morrigan let it stay closed. She was interested in the lock, apparently, not in forcing it.
FKA Mill Fork, if u already read this part~
They agreed to clear out the bandits.
The ground path was churned dirt, dry on the surface but broken underneath from recent movement. Boots, hooves, the occasional cart. Dust hung around ankles when disturbed. Nothing stayed clean long.
Muffin was invaluable. The kind of soil that darkens and disappears blood was nothing to him.
The path into the farmland outside Lothering ran beside fields cut badly, abandoned, and worse. The empty sort of places that looked, from a distance, like they might still be occupied. Not by anyone as pastoral as the fields and little barns implied.
The late-day light hit the fence first, catching on the sharpened tips, spilling inward in long slats cutting everything into stripes of light and shadow.
Muffin stopped, mid-stride, ears forward, attention east. Emma followed his line of sight. Four figures, half-concealed by the fence line.
Then Morrigan’s head turned, just slightly.
“And west,” she said. A patrol. Their timing couldn’t be worse.
The bandits already flanked them, farm on one side, mill on the other. Emma could only hope they hadn’t realized it yet.
“Lure them,” Emma said, looking east. “Choke them at the mill.”
Muffin took off. Alistair didn’t argue. “Alright, let’s go,” he yelled, glancing the sun from his shield.
The eastern group took the bait, three of them committing hard, funneling into the narrow ground between the broken fence and the mill’s base. The two archers hung back. The western group watched. Waited.
Alistair opened with a flask. The acid caught the ground and Muffin, who had not moved where Alistair expected. The dog’s yelp was sharp and indignant. Emma’s anger was sharper.
“Sorry—”
He was already past it. There was never time to fix anything. That was the permanent condition of a fight.
Steel met steel. Muffin hit the first man with his full displeasure and eighty pounds of outraged mabari, buying space they hadn’t earned. Alistair took the second bandit, shield high. Morrigan fell in behind him, her entropic hexes rotting the third man’s footing until he stumbled sideways into nothing.
Leliana’s arrows came in from the mill’s rise, clean angles. One archer went down before he repositioned.
Emma planted her staff into the dirt. Her hands lit. She triaged the field in real time: Alistair’s left thigh bleeding where he’d caught the edge of a strike. Muffin’s acid burns still smoking faintly.
She healed the dog first; He mattered to the plan. Then seeded a spiritual bomb on into the marrow of the remaining archers, felt it commit, but didn’t watch it land.
She was already preparing for the western group. They were still hanging back, still watching. They’d seen the first engagement. They were thinking. More cautious, or more dangerous. Possibly both.
Emma lurked around the mill, watching Alistair raise his shield and sliding forward through the dirt on his heels.
“They have dogs. Of course they have dogs,” he said. But somehow she gathered it from his posture before he made a sound.
“Again,” she said. “West side. Same pull.”
It almost worked. Morrigan took one shot before she should have and the patrol decided against letting Muffin lead them.
The deciding arrow came from the left. It caught Muffin in the shoulder. He went down mid-stride, pinned. One yelp, sharp and furious, let them know: No repositioning now.
No choke point. This was where they fought.
“Damn,” Emma said.
The clash was immediate, ugly. The western group came in with their dogs and the advantage of watching the first engagement. Alistair threw another flask (no allies in the radius, somehow). Frost crept along the edge of Morrigan’s hand, and the temperature dropped as she frosted Alistair’s blade. One dog went down under their combined fire. The second kept circling.
Emma tracked the larger dog, tried to cut off its approach. Muffin followed her aim, finally scrambling from the ground, on a bad leg. He wasn’t fast enough. There were too many angles. They missed the window by a stride. The big dog tore through Alistair’s left side.
Muffin wasn’t going to last. She choose Alistair. She pulled him back from the edge his hasty riposte pretended he wasn’t on.
He was her line between her and the archers. If the line folded, everything else followed.
The shape of his armor, the weak points in the joints, and under his neck, had become a familiar shape. That shape echoed in the light under her hand, sealing what she could.
Leliana’s next arrow caught an archer mid-draw.
Morrigan’s winter chill grasped the remaining men, ice spreading from one’s feet upward until he stood locked and furious. “Take him,” she said, already looking past him.
Emma didn’t take him. She was already tracking the cluster at range, already placing the bomb. Her focus stayed half a beat too long, watching it land.
He shouldn’t have gotten through. Alistair was right there. Morrigan was scanning the field. The frozen man was still frozen. There was no path.
But he did. The bandit slipped through the gap between Alistair’s swing and his recovery, the half-second where the shield was off-angle. He crossed the distance to Emma three strides.
The pommel slammed into her head. She dropped in no time. No warning. Just standing and then not.
Morrigan turned a quarter-second too late. Fast enough to see it, not fast enough to stop it. The same man was already redirecting toward her. His next strike caught her across the ribs and broke her focus. She stepped back, just in time for Alistair to ratchet past her.
He stopped thinking about the archers and their remaining shots, about the frozen man, about how close he was to the ground himself. He hit the fucker shield-first, all weight and momentum, smashing him into the fence. The man hadn’t expected to be pulverized. He didn’t expect the second blow either.
Alistair was still standing. Somehow. He didn’t remember pulling Emma out of the dirt. One moment he was reducing a bandit to sticks. In the next, he had her arm over his shoulder, his sword held a line in his other hand.
Morrigan recovered, still clutching her ribs, rounding on their last assailant.
“On your knees,” she said. The man didn’t listen. Her magic made him.
She raised her staff. The air around him distorted—balance failing, vision fracturing. She rotated her staff and the force hit him in concentric rings.
“Another corpse,” she announced, as he gurgled into the dirt. She chuckled to herself: “Or it will be.”
Emma suddenly went slack around his shoulder. Alistair sunk to his knees, sword thudding into the dirt as he caught her weight.
“Hey. Hey—don’t—”
He managed to lower her more carefully than quickly. Her eyes were closed. He pressed his hand to her shoulder and kept it there.
“She breathes,” Morrigan said, already kneeling on the other side. “For now.”
“She’s fine,” Alistair said. “She’ll be fine. She just— she does this. Sometimes. When she—”
“When she is struck repeatedly and bleeds,” Morrigan supplied dryly.
“Yes. That. She can fix it. She just needs to—” He moved his hand from her shoulder to her face. “—be more conscious.”
“She needs,” Morrigan said, “to not have been struck repeatedly across the skull.”
“Yes. Everyone needs that.” He stopped. Breathed. “She’ll be fine.”
Muffin dragged himself across the ground on three legs, the pinning arrow still lodged in the fourth, nosed Emma’s hand and whined.
She inhaled deeply. Her eyes opened, unfocused, focused on something internal. Refocused, by effort, on the sky, and then on Alistair’s face. The shapes of Morrigan and Leliana behind him.
“Stop moving,” she muttered.
“I’m not moving,” he said.
“’Tis your perception in motion,” Morrigan observed.
Emma blinked. She straightened, leveraging up on his shoulder, her hand already lit, reaching inward to find what needed correcting. His palm flattened to the ground, keeping them steady.
“See? Fine,” Alistair said. To Morrigan. To the dog, who stared at him, still limp and whining.
“I can hear you,” Emma said.
“I know. I was saying you’re fine.”
She didn’t answer. She was running inventory from a head knocked sideways and still reporting the insult. Her healing moved through her in short, focused pulses.
Then she looked at Muffin. Then up at Alistair.
“…you’re hurt.”
“Me? I’m always hurt. Occupational hazard. Comes with the suit and charming personality.”
“No.” She leaned forward slightly, squinting—not quite seeing, more like listening. Her brow drew together. He went still with self-consciousness.
“Ah,” Morrigan said.
Alistair followed her look, to his own arm. It looked normal. “What?”
Emma reached for him and he let her take his wrist. Her fingers found his pulse.
“Poison,” she said.
“Oh, good.” He considered this, now noticing how dizzy he felt. “What, really?”
“Something on one of their blades. It’s not enough to—it won’t—”
She paused.
“Emma,” he said, the pitch in his voice climbing.
“It will pass,” she said.
“How will I feel, before it passes?”
She looked at him for a moment. Then at Morrigan, which was less reassuring. Then at Muffin, which was even less so.
“Uncomfortable,” she said.
“Define uncomfortable.”
“Hot. Painful. Probably dizzy. Your pulse is already off.” She said so clinically, the way she said most things. “The dose is manageable for your size. The heat will be the worst of it.”
“How long?”
“An hour. Maybe two.”
He absorbed this. “Right.”
They were both crouching in the dirt. His weight shifted, fractionally, and he adjusted for it.
“Sit,” she said.
“I’m—” He felt her pull him. Was this really happening? Since when was she keeping him upright? “—sitting down,” he concluded.
He sat. His knees made the decision and his pride accepted the outcome. Emma followed, her hand light on his shoulder, the other still faintly lit.
“I can’t take it out of you,” she said. “It has to move through. I can slow the worst of it.”
“That’s—yes. That’s really, completely fine.” He pressed the back of his hand to his own forehead, registered the heat there, looked faintly betrayed by the information. “It is quite warm.”
Leliana knelt beside them, already working at the clasp on her waterskin. “Is there a clean cloth? To help with the heat.”
Emma went still for a half-second before she reached for her pack.
“Yes,” she said. “That would help.”
Morrigan pressed two fingers together, called the thread of frost, wrung a cloth with a soft crackle, and passed it to Leliana, who pressed the cooled cloth to Alistair’s forehead with practiced steadiness.
He let out a slow breath through his nose, eyes half-closing. The simple physics of cold against hot doing its work.
“He’ll be fine,” Emma said.
Morrigan: “You’ve said this.”
“It’s still true.”
Alistair didn’t open his eyes. The heat was still pressing, insistent, every heartbeat slightly louder than it should have been. But the cold gave it something to push against.
“Bad day, huh?”
No one disagreed.
The mill wall dug into his neck. It was cold, which was good.
The poison had settled in properly now. Sharply uncomfortable, grinding heat under his skin, more like friction than fire. Every heartbeat almost enough to make him regret he still had one.
Alistair had been stabbed and sliced many times. Burned. Nearly suffocated once, an occasion that ended with a giant bird dragging him away and dropping him into a bog.
The residue of that memory was mostly just an impact and then Morrigan’s face. But still very distressing.
This particular problem, he had to wait and not fight through. So he was just sitting there. Feeling terrible. Waiting. Emma had said it wasn’t lethal. So he ignored the part of him insisting otherwise.
An hour. Or two.
Somewhere across the camp, Leliana’s lute threaded through the quiet. Morrigan sat with…whatever she does. Muffin hovered near her, being a nuisance. Good dog.
Emma took the cloth from his head to run frost through it. He heard the crackle as she spread it back over him.
“Thanks,” he said. His voice held. Barely. He chose to count that as a victory.
She was looking at him. He could feel it even with his eyes mostly closed. The kind of visual attention she neglected in a polite conversation but allotted while accessing a casualty.
Then she said, “I’m sorry.”
Which was not expected.
“For the poison?” he asked.
“The secrecy. In Lothering. We were too cautious.”
He let his head rest back against the stone. Yesterday’s problem. Now. While he was being slowly cooked from the inside.
“You’re apologizing,” he said, “for not announcing ourselves to the Chantry before we knew if that was safe.”
“They didn’t care.”
“Right. Lucky us.”
“Ser Bryant barely looked at us.”
“I don’t know why you’re—” It wasn’t worth the effort. His head felt too heavy and also hollow at the same time. “I’m being poisoned. Just so we’re clear on the present concern.”
“I’m aware.” Flat and immediate– a complaint: “As soon as we got rid of that festering wound, you walked straight into this.”
He almost smiled. It came out closer to a grimace.
“You haven’t had it so easy yourself,” he said.
“You took the worst of it.”
She wasn’t complaining about the fight. It was about him getting consistently destroyed over the past few days.
Which—No. Don’t.
He made some motion with his free hand. “I’m built for that.”
She anticipated herself with a deliberate pause.
“Yes. You are the margin of error.” Her voice shifted, not quite anger. “Why are you letting me decide where that margin goes?”
Oh, that was an interesting sentence.
It took a moment to reach him. Not because it was complicated. His stomach was turning sour, and thinking at all was a project.
He opened his eyes properly, which did nothing helpful for his vision but seemed symbolically appropriate.
“You’ve been keeping me alive for two days with no sleep,” he said. “And you got hit in the head. How is your head, incidentally?”
“Fine.”
“Is it, though? What is this conversation we’re having?” He wondered if she was the sort who sat with a fractured skull and called it fine. “If I thought you were wrong, I’d say so.”
“You’re miserable.”
“I’m not—” He stopped. He absolutely was. “I’m somewhat miserable. Poison will do that. Both of us are fine. We’re having a great time. I’m melting and dying in a very undignified way.”
“You are not dying.”
“Comforting. See? Your bedside manner improved,” he meant it.
She’d been there when he needed her to be there. And never put him somewhere dangerous without backing him.
She was hesitating. But she was still here.
Up to the point where she was also taking blows, at least. Which happened faster than he liked to think about.
Emma checked the cloth. “My bedside manner is non-existent.”
“Fine. What else you want from me? You want me to argue more?”
“Yes.”
He considered that. It felt like a trap. Or a test he hadn’t realized he was taking. Like a correct answer should have been reserved for this very moment.
Morrigan was somewhere behind him. He couldn’t see her, but still knew she was looking pointedly at everything she didn’t comment on, enjoying the current proceedings.
“About what,” he said finally. “Specifically. The part where we didn’t confess to the chantry immediately? Where we didn’t die in that field just now?”
“That’s not what I meant. If people are hurt, I don’t hide.” She looked him over. “Not anymore. I should have been clearer about that.”
Not anymore. He sat with that very small thing.
“Right. Lesson learned. And we’re still here.”
“That’s a low bar.”
“It’s the only bar that matters if you miss it.”
Leliana’s lute resolved something in a minor key and stopped.
“Then why don’t we go to Orlais,” she said.
There it was. He’d been dreading for it to come back.
“If surviving is the metric,” she continued. “Experienced Wardens. More of them. Better odds for survival.”
The cloth had gone warm. He didn’t ask her to fix it.
Morrigan told him, before: Emma will not abandon Ferelden, like he was being tedious for not knowing it. Morrigan, of all people, he chose to believe.
“We had this argument already. You—you wanted us to go to Orlais. Which makes sense, but—If we run, we’re just… waiting for someone else to fix it. I can’t—I’m not doing that.”
He stopped. Anything past that felt like… something she wouldn’t know, something he didn’t intend to ask while feverish and half-delirious.
He’d made the argument. He meant it. He waited for her to push back.
She was quiet. Long enough that he started to think she wasn’t going to answer at all, which was normal, that was just Emma—
He shifted slightly, which was a mistake. His whole left side reminded him about the dog who tried and couldn’t claw through his armor. but it really, really tried.
He heard himself groan, but was too hot and dizzy to be properly embarrassed. She retrieved the cloth and made it cold again.
“So there you are,” he concluded faintly, “I disagreed with you. We argued. Are you happy now?”
“No.” He heard her facepalm. He looked at her again. Her shoulders slumped.
This pause was an accident.
“I just— I’m sorry.”
Remorse. It was still not expected.
“I know,” he said, quieter. “Emma—why? You’re the reason I’m still sitting here.”
“I wish I knew,” she said, “how to talk you out of dying here.”
“Oh.” His stomach took a lurch. He swallowed.
I’m sorry, too.
“You said I’m not dying,” he said. “I’m holding you to that.”