Chapter Text
Something changes, though he could not say what, as they walk down the ruins of what must have been a great hall once, the sounds of their armor and steps bouncing against the looming cliffs of rock on either side of them. At the end of it is a door flanked by two burning torches. Everything they have passed through thus far — the village itself, the chantry, the temple, the caverns — has been, though bizarre, no more bizarre than anything else they've done so far. This quiet little door, however, radiates a mesmerizing, inexorable feeling of dread. They could no more turn back now than they could kill the dragon they left sleeping as they made their way here. As Cat pushes the door open, an abrupt and terrifying swell of expectation very nearly sends him running. He doesn't know what he's recoiling away from beyond some enormous, nebulous something. Andraste does not wait for them behind that door, though. No cleansing fire, no sad, disappointed eyes.
It's a relatively small room, not ornate though less crumbling than what they've passed through so far. At the end of it, blocking the way to where they must go, presumably, stands a knight, watching them approach as if he's been waiting for them all this while.
"I bid you welcome, pilgrim," says the knight.
"You must be the Guardian," Cat replies, matching his civil tone. She's still hesitant to put too much weight on her injured leg, the one bitten by one of the many drakes they have come across on this terrible mountain.
"Yes," says the knight. "I am the Guardian of the Ashes. I have waited years for this."
"Why have you been here so long?" Cat asks as they fan out behind her, Zevran and Sten and Morrigan. There must be some trap. There must be some projectile to duck, some poison valve to shut off.
"It has been my duty, my life, to protect the Urn and prepare the way for the faithful who come to revere Andraste," says the Guardian in the muted tones of a librarian, perhaps. The room muffles sound bizarrely. "For years beyond counting have I been here, and shall I remain until my task is done and the Imperium has crumbled into the sea."
"Will your task ever be done?" Cat asks, and he knows it's his duty to stay quiet and let her do the talking, but this sounds closer to her own curiosity than manners or diplomacy, and the Guardian seems to think so, too.
"I do not know, and I do not question." It's a polite dismissal, but a dismissal nonetheless.
"Let's not waste time," Cat agrees, and beside him, Sten shifts his weight. "How do I get to the Urn?"
"You have come to honor Andraste, and you shall, if you prove yourself worthy."
"So I have to fight you?"
"It is not my place to decide your worthiness. The Gauntlet does that. If you are found worthy, you will see the Urn and be allowed to take a small pinch of the Ashes for yourself. If not . . . "
He trails off ominously. Morrigan sniffs.
"What is the Gauntlet?" Cat asks before anyone else can speak.
"The Gauntlet tells the true pilgrims from the false," the Guardian explains. "You will undergo four tests of faith, and we shall see how your soul fares."
No elaboration on the types of tasks, whether feats of strength or cleverness. The endless patient reticence of the Guardian serves only to increase the sense that someone, either Sten or Morrigan, is going to do or say something that will at least break the tension, and Zevran suppresses a sigh just as Cat jumps in.
"All right, let's get this over with then."
It's too much to hope that this Guardian will simply step aside, and indeed, as Cat moves forward, he remains blocking their way.
"Before you go, there is something I must ask," he warns them. "I see that the path that led you here was not easy. There is suffering in your past — your suffering, and the suffering of others. You abandoned your father and mother, leaving them in the hands of Rendon Howe, knowing he would show no mercy. Do you think you failed your parents?"
Rendon Howe. That's a familiar name. Zevran stares at Cat, feeling all the blood in his body flash hot, and then cold. There is a long, sickly pause.
"Yes," Cat says at last. "I should have defended them to the death."
The Guardian regards her with nothing like pity or disappointment, unnervingly neutral.
"Thank you. That is all I wished to know."
"Is there any religion that does not thrive upon guilt like a glutton at his lunch?" Morrigan demands staunchly, and at a glance, her cool contempt does little to obscure her anger. "No? I thought not."
"And now the self-flagellation?" he adds, trying to help in his own way, to ignore the dread rising in his gorge. "That is what comes next in these things, no?"
"Parshaara," Sten agrees calmly. "Leave the past where it falls."
Easy for him to say. None of this is as it should be — this dusty knight who does indeed look as though he has sat waiting for them for centuries, the fires burning where no oil should remain. If they've found the final resting place of the Lady, then how far a leap would it really be to say that She has looked on all this while?
"And what of those that follow you?" the Guardian asks Cat, unfazed and undeterred. "The Antivan elf . . . "
"Oh, is it my turn now?" Zevran interrupts. He's Antivan and an elf, nameless and foreign. But noticed. Known. "Hurrah. I'm so excited."
"Many have died at your hand," the Guardian acknowledges, and there's a sense, at least to Zevran, of an incoming blow. His breath picks up in spite of himself. "But is there any you regret more than a woman by the name of — "
"How do you know about that?"
It tumbles out of him, and he hears his shock in his own voice, the sudden, sharp seriousness. Rinna Rinna Rinna, says the blood pounding in his ears.
"I know much," the Guardian replies. "It is allowed to me. The question stands, however. Do you regret — "
"Yes," he snaps back before the spirit can say her name. "The answer is yes, if that's what you wish to know. I do. Now move on."
Unmoved, the Guardian transfers his placid gaze to Sten, who meets it without blinking.
"Demand whatever answers you want, spirit," he says.
"You came to this land as an observer, but you killed a family in a blind rage. Have you failed your people, by allowing a qunari to be seen in that light?"
"I have never denied that I failed," Sten answers with unshaken dignity, and the Guardian nods.
"And you, Morrigan, Flemeth's daughter — what — ?"
"Begone, spirit." Rage radiates off of the witch like heat. "I will not play your games."
They all tense up, preparing for a fight that . . . simply does not come.
"I will respect your wishes," the Guardian says. "The way is open. Good luck, and may you find what you seek."
A nauseating hush hangs in the air. Cat steps forward first, and Zevran tenses, expecting the Guardian to draw his sword or bring one of his heavy gauntlets down upon her head, for this all to have been a nasty joke at their expense. Nothing. Morrigan follows behind Cat, and he and Sten follow them.
He very much wishes he had answered as Morrigan had, but he had assumed the Guardian would barely tolerate impatience, much less outright refusal, had thought his silly little defiance was a bold stance instead of whiny acquiescence. He likes to think of himself as practical, but he had not, not even for a single panicked second, considered merely saying no.
He would be worried that the others are ruminating on his answer, that their leader is, but he suspects she's too rattled by her own conversation with the Guardian to ponder his own answers. Morrigan clearly doesn't care, he decides, boiling mad as she is, but Sten is already looking at him when Zevran tries to sneak a glance at him. There's something distressingly close to understanding in the way Sten regards him. Does he compare his sins to whatever he assumes Zevran did? Does he imagine — well, the Guardian had said woman, not girl, so he cannot think himself in the company of another child-killer, though Zevran, indeed, has arguably been a child-killer in every sense of the term. No, it's the regret, which Zevran had confirmed so readily. Morrigan would think such a tawdry tale tasteless and beneath her. And Cat —
He tries to shove down his hammering heart, to ignore the incongruous sweat freezing his skin as Cat opens the now unguarded door to whatever they must face next. He has revealed relatively little, in the grand scheme of things. What a shock to the others, that he has murdered someone. Perhaps they are only shocked that he might have cared for one of his victims. Cat, on the other hand — and yet, it would be clear to anyone that her losses are recent, though he cannot picture her abandoning anyone. Rendon Howe, though. Rendon Howe he can picture with perfect ease.
What greets them is a long hall, lined on either side with glowing spirits who don't rush them as he might have expected, but instead wait patiently for them to approach, greeting them only with a riddle.
Cat answers each easily after a short pause, listening to each dead thing recite what it has come to define itself as. He's barely paying attention even as each spirit dissolves into light, even Shartan, and each flies at the doors at the end of the hall until they swing open. Andraste's — well, mother. Andraste's blighted mother. They are wading through history, history he finds matters to him very much, and all he can think about is his own dead past. If these stupid Ashes really are here, he'll get down on his knees and thank the Maker and Andraste and dedicate his life to — to whatever it is he might be that would please Them.
As if she can hear his thoughts, Cat comes to a halt so abrupt he nearly runs into her. Before them is another spirit. An older man, richly dressed. Not silvery and insubstantial as the other ghosts had been, but undeniably not of this world.
"My dearest child," it says. Cat makes a noise, then manages two barely audible syllables.
"Father?"
"You know that I am gone," the spirit says like the other spirits had, rote and insistent and mournful in an impersonal way, "and all your prayers and wishes will not bring me back. No more must you grieve, my girl. Take the pain and the guilt, acknowledge it, and let go. It is time."
Though this is surely the visage of her father, it offers little in the way of comfort or even acknowledgment of her distress, no raised hand or pause in its speech. It speaks over the ragged breath she takes.
"You have such a long road ahead of you, and you must be prepared. And so I leave this in your hands. I know you will do great things with it." Undeterred by her evident fear, the spirit holds out an amulet that seems solid, and indeed, when he drops it into Cat's reluctant hand, it lands in her palm like any other tangible thing, the chain spilling over her fingers.
As if he had blinked and missed it, the spirit disappears, and they are left with a far more terrible silence than before. Without a word, Cat slings the amulet around her neck, starts walking, and after a moment, Sten follows her. No shade materializes to moralize to him, nor to Morrigan. And when Zevran steps forward after them, though he thinks — hopes? — for a moment that he might not be similarly spared, the only thing that awaits him is air.
They pass into the next room, filled with shades he barely has time to make out before they fly at them, and it's only when he hears the echoes of their groans of pain and angry gasps, it's only when they are striking them down that he realizes these shades are echoes of them. They are killing themselves in service of some sordid and literal metaphor. He would laugh at it, at the triteness of it all, if he did not have his own dying gurgle ringing in his ears, if Cat's shade did not sound exactly like the real her when it wheezes its last on the end of his blade.
"Maker's breath, I'm beautiful," he says with a cheerfulness that bounces off the walls awkwardly, a little too manic, a little too glib. "Did you see that? Did you see me?"
Morrigan sighs loudly.
"Magnificent," Zevran concurs. He wishes he had the certainty the unamused witch possesses, wishes he could borrow some of Sten's stoic pragmatism. He's going to be ground beneath the heel of something so much larger than himself that he can't even begin to fathom it, a buzzing, annoying insect snuffed out.
No one says anything as they reach the next part of the Gauntlet, a deep, dark hole in the middle of a circular room preventing them from the doorway on the other side. They are meant to throw themselves in it, he supposes.
"'Andraste loved Her disciples as She loved the Maker,'" Cat reads dully from a marker on the floor. Her voice echoes around the empty room. It's improbably warm here, or maybe it's the exertion. He's sweating. "'As we have faith in the Maker, so we must have faith in our friends.'"
"Another obstacle? 'Tis almost beyond endurance," Morrigan says after a moment, perhaps because she does not know what this means, and neither, quite frankly, does Zevran.
"I have faith in my friends well enough. Faith that they will one day stab me in my back," he comments, but contempt for the trial has as much effect as exactly nothing.
They all stand in silence, staring around for some helpful clue besides the riddle, or at the door beyond their reach, or into the depths of the chasm before them, where the light from the torches does not seem to reach as far as it ought to.
"Tell me what you would have me do here, kadan, and it will be done," Sten says after a moment in the gentlest voice Zevran has ever heard him use, and Cat takes a shuddering breath.
She paces around one side of the room, and as her foot touches one of what Zevran had taken to be decorative tiles, a ghostly stone platform appears over the drop.
"Oh," she says, brow furrowed. The removal of her weight vanishes the platform. "Pick one to stand on and do it."
It's not the most efficient approach she's ever taken, and it takes a great deal of shuffling around to discover that stepping on two of the stones at the same time seems to create a more concrete platform than before, and then yet still more to discover how to prompt the appearance and solidification of more than one. But this slow, methodical experimentation gradually begins to build a bridge.
"Does your Andraste have such an excess of followers that she is willing to lure them to their deaths with ghosts and lies?" Sten asks after several minutes of this, his kinder tone exchanged back for his usual unimpressed delivery. If Cat is bothered, she doesn't show it; if Cat hears him at all, she doesn't show it.
At last there are three platforms floating in mid-air, all of them opaque.
"It looks solid enough, but toss a rock — " Sten is grumbling to himself when Cat, with no apparent hesitancy or care for the abyss beneath her feet, steps out onto the first platform, puts her whole weight onto it without even testing it, and Zevran's heart lodges in his throat.
She doesn't pass through it; her foot hits stone. They've successfully rendered the path to the next door solid. It could be the strain of the trials so far, or it could be a trick of the light, but Cat looks vaguely . . . disappointed.
"Finally," Morrigan mutters, and she walks briskly and firmly to stand by Cat, watching the other woman with her jaw set. The absence of her weight does not seem to affect the nature of the now almost ordinary stone platforms, but an aftershock of anxiety still sparks his nerves.
"I'm sure there's a moral in here," he adds. It sends a terrible thrill up his spine to remove his weight from his switch, to approach and then step onto what had not been there moments before, but it's no different than any other bridge he's crossed. He thinks for a second that he'll have to nudge Cat forward with a hand, but she walks further. Each platform proves as safe as the last. "Something about building bridges with friends, and such. Something poetic . . . " He can't think of anything else to say. "Oh, well."
"The Blight ravages the land, and here we are playing with switches and stepping stones," Sten mutters behind him.
Another chamber awaits them, another puzzle, this one with a wall of fire crackling merrily. And there are the Ashes, on the other side of it, he thinks. There is the Urn, resting beneath a statue of Andraste. He feels a sudden lurch in his stomach, like something in him is compelling him to kneel.
"Mother of mercy!" he gasps before he can help himself. "It — it is real!"
If anyone finds it objectionable that a not insignificant part of him had not believed they would be able to succeed, they keep it to themselves, and indeed, it's like he's said nothing at all. While he'd gaped, Cat had approached a small altar before the flames, read the inscription on it, and without any explanation, she now begins stripping off her armor, and then the clothes beneath. Morrigan follows her lead, then Sten, and Zevran doesn't want to be the only one of them standing around with clothes on like a fool, and so he scrambles to get everything off, too, until finally they all stand naked in front of the remains of the Maker's Prophet, Whose statue gazes down at them all with a polite sort of unfocus, as if She doesn't want to embarrass them.
As with the floating platforms, Cat steps forward without so much as a hand held out to test her theory, and for one, horrible moment, the flames lick around and over her body hungrily. But not an inch of her burns, not even her hair. The fire behaves more like water as it moves over her and allows her to pass through it unchanged.
He and Morrigan follow within seconds of each other, Sten presumably just behind them, and Zevran is struck, as he walks through the wall of fire, by how warm the sensation is. It's not that he doesn't feel the flames; he does, and were they wet, they would be as welcome as a hot bath, shocking in contrast to the freezing stone beneath his bare feet. Like water, they reach everywhere.
"You have been through the trials of the Gauntlet: you have walked the path of Andraste," intones what can only be the voice of the Guardian, emanating from the walls themselves, "and like Her, you have been cleansed. You have proven yourself worthy, pilgrim. Approach the Sacred Ashes."
The fire disappears as if snuffed by a giant forefinger and thumb, and suddenly they are reclothed, and he's too surprised to make a joke about how he'd missed his opportunity to properly ogle at them all, that they had missed their opportunity to ogle him. It's a bizarre sensation, to be drenched in sweat but covered in dry, warm clothes, each buckle and tie conscientiously snug, and for some reason, this makes his throat tighten. They all approach the altar. There's an eternal flame in Andraste's hand that throws strange shadows over Her face, lending the illusion of watchfulness to what he really fucking hopes is just more stone. Her face is kind.
"I stand in awe," Morrigan announces, and he swallows hard, relieved in spite of himself. "Really."
"Congratulations, you found a waste bin," Sten adds.
"Nice vase," Zevran concurs. It's just as well he's never going back to Antiva. No one would ever believe this. Maybe he really should have become a brother. "I should get one for my house." The house he doesn't have.
Cat remains silent, and she crouches to carefully remove the Urn's lid, which rattles hollowly as she sets it aside, and she produces a leather pouch from her belt that whatever magic had redressed them had made sure to return. She takes a pinch of Ashes — Blessed Lady — and drops it in the pouch before tying it tightly closed, tucking it away down the collar of her armor to rest between her skin and her undershirt. Then she replaces the lid upon the Urn and stands.
"That's it," she says.
It seems impossible, and none of them move for a moment, whether out of exhaustion or the daunting thought of the long path back down the mountain. He looks up again at Andraste, Whose unseeing eyes remain fixed on some spot far away and over them all. Her knight had known Rinna. If he were alone, he would kiss his fingers and press them to Her statue's plinth; it's a mark of his cowardice that he cannot bring himself to do so while witnessed. He remembers Almedina in a far poorer chantry than this, singing hymns about such an action. It's just as well he will never see her again, just as well that if she survives still, she will never know him as any older than a boy of seven with too-big ears and fidgety fingers.
Cat breaks the spell by starting back down the stairs, and he notices she limps still.
He wants to reach out and touch her, too, to try to convey some complicated thing that perhaps they can leave behind in this tomb, some reassurance that they may now proceed back through the temple to where the real world awaits, filled with darkspawn, yes, and Rendon Howe, and a thousand other unpleasant things, but a real, tangible world nonetheless where they spend the majority of their lives. The expression on her face is foreboding, however, and cowed in spite of himself, he hangs back, letting her lead without comment. There's a corpse of some unlucky adventurer who had not, it seems, been worthy, and he rests beside a door that, upon opening, leads right back onto the mountaintop.
He's just about to let himself relax when he hears the roar.
It's not as distant as the first time, and it's followed by the flapping of great, sail-like wings. Without a word, Cat fumbles the pouch out of her armor and thrusts it at Morrigan.
"Why — ?" the witch startles, but Cat doesn't answer her, having gone running for some Maker blighted reason directly to yes, the dragon, which lands heavily between them and the rest of the temple, sending rocks crumbling from the higher peaks down into where they are now trapped. Whatever good Morrigan's limited healing had done, Cat undoes it now, and by the time she stands before the dragon, she can barely put any weight onto her leg. The cult's dragon stretches out her great, lizard-like neck and lets out a rippling cry that sounds horrifically like a scream.
Sten launches himself forward to join Cat, and the dragon rears back with flames gathering and flickering between its spindly mouth of teeth.
"No!" Morrigan yells, but they're all forced to dive out of the way to avoid the stream of roaring flame. Zevran rolls farther than he means, and he scrambles to right his balance. There's Cat — still alive, just on the ground and struggling to get to her feet. And there's Sten, trying unsuccessfully to draw the dragon's attention.
He bolts after Cat in the hopes of tackling her or yanking her out of the way or something, at least, and for a brief moment, it seems like success is likely if not assured.
Then the tail whips around. Cat's wheeze echoes around this mountain corridor, just like her shadowy double within the temple had when Zevran had sliced behind her knee, and he's completely helpless to do anything but watch as Cat hits the ground hard, easy prey for the lumbering creature flexing its wings wider and wider as it looms over her.
Sten lands a blow against one of his hind legs, and as it whips its head around to snap at him, a crackle of electricity splats against its neck, arcing sparks traveling outwards.
"Foolish!" he can hear Morrigan yelling behind him. "Foolish!"
He can't tell what she means, if it's Cat's recklessness or Sten's or his own or if she's just screaming to vent her terror, but whatever the case may be, he ducks through the forceful wave of air that comes rushing at him courtesy of the wings, bringing with it a smattering of dust and smaller rocks against his face, blowing through his hair until it must stand straight back.
There's an opening while the dragon is occupied with Sten, and what does he do best if not squeeze himself into holes?
"Come, let us make a run for it," he suggests in a panicked, breathless laugh as he reaches where Cat is struggling to get to her feet. "I've never really been a get between dragons kind of guy."
She stares up at him in abject horror, and he has exactly half a second to ponder why before the claw slams into his body, and suddenly the world swings down and away from him, all his organs and blood shoving against the blunt boundary of his front. He gets a brief flash of Cat's armor before the teeth all pierce his body at once, and how lucky, they're all concentrated in the lower half of his body, as he is more than able to fill his lungs in one shocked gasp and scream it all out again. A stomach wound. He had always felt that if he were to go out, it would be a bloody stomach wound that would do it.
The next few minutes or hours or days are simply sensations of chaos. He is in the air, impaled in a thousand different places, each separate tooth a different length, some close enough together that he can feel them rubbing against each other in the unfortunate sack of flesh that is his body. He cannot so much as kick his killer, can barely do anything but try to hold onto the maw that engulfs him, so that the whiplash of being shaken around does not snap his neck or his spine.
This is it, he realizes. Cat had given him a reprieve, but death has finally come to take its due, and so —
~
He blinks his eyes open to the sky, which is a good deal darker than it had been the last time he'd looked at it, still too bright to keep his eyes open. Pieces of his awareness converge slowly: the cold first, always the cold. Settled deep in his bones. Then the pain, or the space it occupies. He should be in a lot more of it, he thinks. Like a small wooden ball in a large bowl he can sense the injury as well as how it's been managed. He can't even shift to test his theory, but he's awake enough now that he can track it more accurately. Teeth in his belly. An enormous tongue. He should, by rights, probably be dead.
And he's also less cold than he ought to be. Half of his body is cradled in someone's arms, someone who is breathing at the deliberately careful pace of a sufferer.
"Ah, we must stop meeting like this," he croaks.
"What?" Cat asks, comically conscientious. He peels his eyes open again. She looks scared. Her dark eyes are huge, her mouth taut. She's pulled multiple someone's cloaks over them both in addition to her own, and so they are cocooned together, shielded by some large outcropping of rock from the worst of the wind, which he can hear howling round the mountain.
"Thought I was dead," he clarifies. "Woke up to you instead. The others?"
"They've gone back to get Wynne, " she says. "We'll be cozy enough here until they get back. Still a few hours before nightfall." Not true. Not good if she's lying.
"Ah," he manages, "alone at last." She makes a valiant attempt at a laugh.
"I'm sure you miss Antiva now," she remarks. He shivers in response, which hurts badly, and she pulls the cloaks tighter around him. "What is it like this time of year?"
"Hmm?"
"What is Antiva like this time of year, Zev?" she asks, jostling him a little. He blinks out of the doze he'd slid into, and her face hovers above him, large, dark eyes worried. "Would you tell me about it?"
He tries. He reaches into the dull, aching fog of his brain and sifts through it for anything with a sparkle, anything salvageable, but his thoughts are too clumsy to grasp.
"I fear I am all storied out," he says after a moment, and it takes an effort to articulate even that much. "Perhaps you could tell me a story instead."
"Will you promise to stay awake?"
He blinks again, guilty to have been caught out.
"I will try," he replies, and she slips a hand beneath his cloak, beneath his own hand where it rests on his chest.
"When I say 'tap,' tap my hand," she orders, and obediently, he lifts his forefinger and lets it fall. "Good," she whispers, and then she shifts, wincing slightly. Let's see . . . a story for Zev, let's see . . . do you know the one about the — the Soldier and the Seawolf?"
Something about it itches familiarly, but he shakes his head.
"Everyone knows the song, or almost everyone — very long song, depending on the version — but the real story's better. In my opinion, anyway."
You babble, he thinks, and he almost hears Taliesen's voice in his head saying it with him, when you are nervous. It is a common tell.
"Tap, Zev?"
He does.
"Good. He was a soldier, as you could have probably guessed, and she was a fierce raider dubbed the Seawolf by the Orlesians, whose warships she sunk like they were nothing. He didn't recognize her, asked her to fetch some stupid thing as if she were his servant, and her temper, even then, was infamous. He nearly went off a cliff he backed up so fast to avoid her wrath. She hauled him back up because she wasn't done telling him off. As first meetings go, not auspicious."
She sucks in a breath suddenly, and with an effort, he wrestles himself back to alertness.
"Ah, give me a moment," she mutters. "Give me a moment. Still awake?"
He taps.
"Good. Want some warming salve?"
"You have been holding out on me," he comments slowly.
"I have been rationing," she corrects him, and suddenly one glove pulls off just enough to expose his skin to the cold. It burns and then it doesn't, and then it burns again in a different way. She tugs his glove back on, adjusts his sleeve, does the same to his other hand. Oh, his gloves. He'd left the gloves Cat had found for him with Bodahn and Sandal, had opted for gloves he wouldn't mind getting dirty. He wishes he had them now. "They'll be here soon," Cat says, and his stomach, his pelvis, his hip throb. "Lucky us, not scrambling down the mountain right now."
"Lucky us," he agrees.
"Back to the story," she says with an approximation of good cheer. "They worked quite well together, the Soldier and the Seawolf, past that first meeting. Fell into a sort of competition, and then into a sort of friendship, and then without meaning to, it became apparent to everyone except for them that they'd fallen into a sort of love, too."
She recites all this not in a rush, but certainly like someone trying their best not to vomit it all out at once. He hopes she's not nauseous, come to think of it. The only thing worse than dying of a ghastly wound on a mountain that had thoroughly beaten him long before they actually ran into the dragon would be all of that with the addition of Cat being sick on him.
"But then the Soldier's father died, and this is the part the song leaves out," Cat says, voice tight. "He had to accompany the body home, back to Highever. This was on the heels of a great victory, close as one breath in and one breath out. He stepped outside for air at the celebration and the messenger nearly ran into him with the news. All the way from South Reach he rode beside the body, and then when he made it home — well, it's complicated, but the long and short of it is that it took him four months to settle affairs. Four months, and every day he sent the Seawolf a letter. Sometimes he sent her more than one."
He anticipates her request, taps her hand as her inhale signals an interruption.
"A romantic man," he murmurs. The warmth of her hand on his chest briefly disappears, reappearing at his temple where she smooths his hair back.
"Yes," she replies. "He was. Do you want to hear what comes next?"
"I am on tenterhooks." It slips out as tennerhoogs. Her hand returns to his chest.
"She didn't get a letter a day, of course. Some days she received none, some days it was five at once, and the letters themselves were no more consistent in their content. He couldn't come right out and say he loved her, you see. He was a romantic man, but not so much in letters."
"Mmm."
"He sent less than a paragraph regarding his father's funeral, though it was the loneliest he'd ever felt. But he spent four pages detailing which of the visiting nobles he thought she could defeat in hand-to-hand combat — all of them, naturally — and how she would do it. Said imagining her trouncing them was the only thing that kept him awake during negotiations."
"How long," he asks with some effort, "has it been since the others left?"
"I don't know," she replies. "You were passed out for a long while. I think no more than two hours. Am I boring you?"
"No," he whispers.
He expects her to resume her tale — out of it as he is, he nevertheless knows it must surely end in love requited and triumph, and he'd like to hear of such things in this moment, but she remains silent for what feels like a long time, the relatively steady rhythm of her breathing suddenly stiff and constrained. If he weren't so useless, he would tease her, make her smile or laugh, but his tongue won't cooperate. He settles for nudging his head into her palm.
"I'm going to kill Eoman," she says after a moment, and his heart lurches.
"Hmm?"
"I'm going to kill Eamon," Cat repeats. "Even if the ashes work, I'm going to kill him."
He hums his assent, heart still unsteady in his chest. The wind whistles.
"Zev," she says after a moment in a whisper, an apology in the form of his name. He sighs. "You can't fall asleep. You have to stay awake. You have to keep me company, all right? You wouldn't leave me out here all alone, would you?"
Not by choice, no, but what choice has he ever had? Coward. You had enough of one.
"A notch — on the rack," he agrees, half to himself. Someone sniffles, a wet slurp of a sound, a hot breath on his face.
"Come on, Zev. Don't make me beg."
Surely you wouldn't ask me to beg, Rinna says.
"No," he rasps.
Why not, when you beg so prettily?
"They can't be long now. Going to have such a laugh about this later." She's shivering now, and it jars his wound, or rather half of his body, unpleasantly. "This is the worst mountain in the world. Cannot recommend it. Terrible hospitality from the locals. Wretched lodgings."
Leather pats his cheek insistently, as annoying as it is disorienting. He grimaces.
"Please, Zev. Stay awake. I'm sorry. Please."
Please, Rinna says, laughing, but her eyes are terrified. Please! Is that what you would like to hear?
"I would have liked to go to Antiva," Cat says in a voice so small and rickety that he wrenches open his eyes, staring up at the curve of her jaw, half-hidden in her hood. "Oriana used to talk all the time about how much she missed it. How much warmer it is than here. Than this stupid place."
As if she'd conjured a piece of it merely with longing, he feels warm, as home as he's ever been. Now he remembers the smell of leather, the seabirds wheeling over the square, and he misses it as if none of it had ever happened. He doesn't want to die in Ferelden. Go, he'd like to tell her. Forget all this. Do what he'd done and leave it all behind. If she would only just go, just run, but Taliesen has her wrist in his grip as she twists and pleads in earnest, no escape plan now, no way out now, all her cleverness at a dead end.
Because she trusted you, he reminds himself. Because she was the only one out of the three of us who didn't believe we would do it.
I didn't do it! Rinna cries. I would never, I would never do such a thing to you!
She weeps, that same disgusting, slurping sniffle, snot and tears, the picture of a cornered animal, disbelief writ large all over her face. It's this more than anything else, this feigned helplessness, this revolting, clinging weakness that fills every inch of him with a rage or a terror so cold it numbs him from the inside out. He is freezing to death, sweat pouring off his skin, and Taliesen sighs.
"She said she wanted to take Oren someday."
Come, Rinna. We can still fix this.
She knows. She isn't a fool. She's never been a fool.
Tell us why, yes? Stop crying, it's all right. Just tell us why.
"Lo lamento," he manages.
"What?"
He regrets it. He regrets everything. He's little and scared and there's a boy with big, brown eyes who keeps staring at him. If he'd prayed more, if he'd prayed the right way, this wouldn't have happened to him.
"¿Sigues ahí?" he whispers.
"I'm here." Someone squeezes him. Warmth again, like a sputtering flame, and the wound in his belly throbs. "Why did you do that, hmm? Why did you go running after it?"
Why did you?
"Please," Cat is saying, barely audible but unmistakably in tears. "Please don't die. Please don't die. Please stay awake."
He wants to tell her it's out of his hands, that if it were his choice, he wouldn't frighten her.
"I'm sorry I led us here," she whispers. Her weeping is strained. It's because she's trying not to jostle him, he realizes from a distance. She's trying to keep her abdomen steady. "I'm sorry — I'm sorry. Sten was right, this was the wrong decision. This is my fault."
"The story," he manages.
"Zev," she sobs, and she cannot help her diaphragm spasming any more than he can help the whimper that escapes him. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
He taps her hand as encouragingly as he can under the circumstances, and she takes his fingers and squeezes them.
"They wrote so many letters," she ekes out. "They loved each other — so much. He asked her to come to him — and she did, and they lived — they lived for many years, and their children thought they would never, ever find anyone to love as much — as their parents loved each other." She's hyperventilating, the consequences of trying to hold her breath to calm down, and more than his rearranged guts, he cannot bear listening to her like this when he can do so little, when he is so much the cause of it. "That's the end. That's all there is."
"Final extraño," he tries to say, but his lips barely part. He can't remember when he'd closed his eyes. He can't tell if they're open now and this is merely the darkness preceding death. He is surprised to have lasted this long, but then, that would be true no matter what. Strange ending. Strange ending, indeed.
"Here!" Cat yells suddenly. "We're over here!"
"Cat!" someone shouts back.
"Over here!" she sobs, and then a hand cups his face. "All right, Zev," Cat whispers, manic, "última prueba del día: don't mention Wynne's bosom while she heals you. Not even once. ¿Puedes hacerlo?"
"Me pides demasiado," he croaks, and then whether his eyes are closed or not, the darkness envelops his ears and nose and everything subsides, even the pain in his belly, even the noise, even the sound of Rinna sobbing and sobbing and sobbing.