From a distance it had looked precarious and top-heavy. Up close, it was worse.
Lothering’s windmill sat on a mound of earth that had been piled, not grown. Its sides were too smooth, too steep to be natural. Though intentionally built, the mound was too small to properly support the structure perched on it.
Emma sat with her back against the building, wood grafted onto stone like everything else in Ferelden. The wooden gallery overhung not just her, but the slope itself, supported by scaffolding driven into the dirt. Built as a temporary measure, settled indefinitely.
Gears churning inside, blades rotating outside. A rhythm pulling sky into earth.
It was an excellent vantage point. Emma could see everything: yellowing grasses, abandoned farmland, a sparce smattering of scraggly trees. Muffin circling, nosing something that smelled like death and probably was. Even their camp in the shadow of the highway. Close enough the sound of screaming would carry. Far enough to look small.
And Alistair, bungling upward, nearly sliding back down. She greeted him flatly, just his name, as he crested the hill.
“Hi,” He said, breathless.
Muffin abandoned his investigation and easily bounded up to greet him, with the enthusiasm of someone who’d never met a bad decision he didn’t like.
“And hello to you too, I suppose,” Alistair sidestepped the dog more gracefully than he ascended the hill.
“Did Morrigan send you?” Emma asked.
“No. Well. Sort of. She dismissed me. She made this face. You know the one. Like she was watching someone drown and taking notes for later.”
Emma huffed, fond despite herself, picturing her.
Alistair leaned on the doorframe, looking as though it may collapse out of spite. It held. He looked down at her under the shadow of the platform, but didn’t say anything. Just existed next to her, mail jangling quietly, as far as mail can be quiet. Radiating a particular contradiction of passive-agressive pressure that comes of trying not to apply pressure.
They watched Muffin urinate on the biggest tree he could find.
“You’re not going to try to talk me out of leaving,” Emma said.
“Would it work?”
“No.”
His face was a careful neutral he relied on under strain of thoughts he didn’t want to have out loud.
“But you’ll try anyway.” Emma looked up into the dark underside of the gallery, pressing the back of her skull into the masonry.
“I will.” He picked up a stone and turned it over in his hands. “You know what’s funny?” he said. “Not funny. Funny like when you realize something unpleasant. Just. Duncan told him, you know. King Cailan, I mean. Told him to wait for Orlais… but Cailan wouldn’t wait.”
“And so…Duncan could’ve retreated to Orlais, himself. But he didn’t.”
“Duncan had backup,” she said quickly. “An army. A king. A plan.”
“He had Loghain,” Alistair said. Then, quieter, “Which turned out to be worse than nothing. And he stayed anyway. Because the darkspawn were here. They are here.”
“If he’d gone to Orlais,” she spread her cold fingers over her heating forehead, “Maybe Ferelden would still have a Warden-Commander.”
“Trust me, I know,” his voice cracked. “That’s exactly it. I’ve thought about it every day since Ostagar. I can spend the rest of my life wishing he’d chosen differently, or I can try to make his choice mean something.”
The silence, from her reluctance to leverage this wound, was long. But finally:
“Duncan had poor choices. Following him into the grave doesn’t make his end meaningful.”
Emma had to conclude that she wanted to talk Alistair out of staying in Ferelden as much as he wanted to talk her into it.
“Come with me,” she said, suddenly tired. “If we stay, we die. Everyone stupid enough to follow us gets killed. We shouldn’t do that to them.”
“I can’t,” he said. Soft. Final. “When we come back, with people and an army and plans, we’ll find graves. A lot of them. People who waited for help that came too late.”
He looked past their camp, at the earth they’d just upturned for the bounty hunters–just desperate refugees.
“And I’d spend the rest of my life wondering if we were wrong.” A breath. “Wouldn’t you?”
“That’s not fair. We’re not responsible for that.”
“This isn’t fair,” he said, rushing now, like if he stopped he’d break. “We’re the only Wardens left in Ferelden and we barely know what we’re doing. It’s all completely unfair. I’m—” He swallowed. “I’m sorry.”
Emma stared at him. At the armor that still didn’t quite fit. At the intese earnestness, the dauntless determination to get himself killed.
Well, not completely dauntless.
He was reluctant to kill the assassins who tracked them here, to strike back at the desperate pitchfork wielders. The many who tried to collect their heads by now.
But he did it. He killed them.
“Stay,” he said. Quieter. “We’ll handle it. Or we won’t. But at least we won’t die wondering if we should have tried.”
She exhaled, long and shaky.
“That is the worst sales pitch I’ve ever heard.”
“I know.”