by David Gaider
“Look.” Loghain sighed heavily. “We don’t know for sure who’s hunting you back there. You say they’re working with the Orlesians, I’m willing to take your word for it.” The blond man looked about to object, but Loghain held up a hand. “Whoever they are, it sounded like there’s quite a few of them. They’re going to figure out soon enough that you got out of the forest. First place they’re going to look for you is in Lothering. Do you have somewhere else to go?”
The blond man hung his head, looking grim. “No, I . . . suppose not. Nowhere I can get to easily.” Then he set his jaw and looked up at Loghain. “But I’ll make do.” For a moment, Loghain actually believed he might try. No doubt he would fail, but he would try. Whether this was a sign of stubbornness or foolishness or even something else, he couldn’t tell.
“We have a camp,” Loghain offered. “It’s hidden.”
“You both . . . You didn’t have to help me, I know that. I’m grateful.” His look was reluctant. “It’s not necessary.”
“If nothing else, I’m sure we could find an old cloak for you. Get you cleaned up and . . . less conspicuous.” He shrugged. “Or you can go your own way. Up to you.”
The fellow squirmed, shivering again in the cold as a breeze blew in from the field. For a moment Loghain thought he looked lost, adrift in his own little free fall from whatever life he had led. Fate could hand you a poor hand when you least expected it, that Loghain knew very well. He recognized the signs, even if his sympathy was minimal. This offer was all the blond man was going to get, after all.
Dannon snorted. “Maker’s breath, man! Will you look at yourself? What else are you going to do!”
Loghain eyed the big man dubiously. “You changed your tune rather quickly.”
“Bah! You’re the one who dragged him along. Now that he’s here, he may as well just come.” He turned on his heel and stomped off. “If it’ll get me back to a fire any faster, I’m all for it.”
The young man stared at the ground, uncomfortable and shamefaced. “I . . . don’t have anything valuable.” And then he added: “To repay you, I mean.”
To steal was what he’d really meant. But it was hard to be offended when he and Dannon were indeed thieves, after all. “It certainly doesn’t look that way, does it?”
There wasn’t much else the blond man could say. He nodded lamely.
Loghain motioned his head toward Dannon, who was already long gone. “We’d better catch up to him then, before he manages to fall in a hole somewhere.” He stepped forward and extended a hand. “You can call me Loghain.”
The blond man hesitated a fraction before taking Loghain’s hand and shaking it. “Hyram.”
It was a lie, of course. Loghain wondered for a moment if he would regret doing this. His gut had never been wrong before, but there was always a first time. Still, the die had been cast. Nodding to Hyram, he turned, and the two left the forest together.
2
When Maric awoke, he was certain he was back at the rebel camp, the victim of some terrible nightmare brought on by bad stew. Surely his mother was about to sweep into his room, reprimanding him for sleeping so late. But even as he felt a wave of palpable relief, he knew it wasn’t true. The blanket covering him was threadbare and moldy-smelling, the room around him tiny and unfamiliar. Cuts and bruises suffered the previous night were announcing their presence. Slowly he began to remember everything.
Several times during the trek, the one called Loghain had become certain they were being followed. It vexed the big fellow, Dannon, when Loghain insisted on taking lengthy detours off their route. Maric didn’t begrudge the extra caution, but by the time they reached the foothills, his legs had been ready to give out. They had spent two hours trudging in the dark, frozen to the core, with barely a word exchanged among the three of them. He only dimly remembered reaching the camp itself and being surprised by the number of filthy tents scattered amid the rocks and bush. He had expected maybe a handful of outlaws, but here was an entire community hidden in the cliffs. He remembered a blur of suspicious eyes and whispered accusations greeting him. By then, Maric no longer cared whether they decided to lock him up or cook him for dinner. The sleep he needed desperately had at some point reached up and claimed him.
A gentle sound of splashing drew Maric into the present. He made the mistake of opening his eyes to bright afternoon sunlight shining through a small window, making him wince. His vision was blurry, and his head throbbed with an insistent and unpleasant pounding. Blinking, his eyes adjusted enough to see, but there wasn’t much to look at. He remembered one permanent structure in the camp, a tiny log hut that couldn’t have consisted of more than a single room, and he assumed this was it. The furnishings were sparse: the rickety bed he occupied, a single table, and a few piles of what looked like dirty rags. The only adornment was a wood carving hung above his bed: a blazing sun within a circle. A holy symbol.
Maric flexed his shoulders, trying to cope with the pain. In the back of his mind, he registered the surprising fact that underneath the blanket he was wearing little more than his smallclothes.
“Did I wake you?” a voice came from beside his bed. He craned his neck and realized that a woman had been kneeling next to him the entire time, soaking a rag in a bowl of water. “I apologize. I am trying to be as gentle as I can.” She sounded matronly and kind, and she wore red vestments that marked her as a priest of the Chantry. He’d had few opportunities to step into a proper house of worship since the Chantry had come down in favor of the usurper long ago, but Mother had still insisted on his education in such matters. He believed in the Maker and honored the sacrifice of His first wife and prophet, Andraste, as any other Fereldan might. Maric certainly knew a priest when he saw one. What was she doing here in a camp of outlaws?
“Your . . . Reverence?” His voice came out as a hoarse croak, and he coughed, intensifying the pounding in his head. He groaned out loud and laid his head back down to stop the spinning room from making him nauseated.
The woman chuckled ruefully. “Oh, dear me, no. Nothing so grand as that.” Maric now saw her more clearly. Age had weathered her, but gracefully. Her blond curls had given way to gray, and her weary eyes were heavily lined. It was easy enough to see the beauty she had no doubt once been, long ago. Aside from the vestments, she wore a gold medallion emblazoned with the image of Andraste’s cross and its wreath of holy flame. She noticed his gaze and smiled. “My days within the Chantry hierarchy are long behind me, I’m afraid.”
She finished wringing out the stained cloth and then returned to wiping his face. The water was cool and refreshing, and so Maric closed his eyes and allowed her to minister to him. When she finally stopped, he touched her hand. “How long have I . . . ?”
She paused, studying him with those weary gray eyes. There was compassion there, he saw, but also suspicion. “Most of the day,” she finally answered. Then she smiled reassuringly and stroked the hair from his forehead. “Not to worry, lad. Whatever you’ve done, you’re safe enough here for now.”
“And where is here, exactly?”
“Loghain didn’t tell you?” She sighed and soaked the cloth again, creating an impressive bloom of scarlet in the water. “No, he wouldn’t have, would he? It would take a dragon to pull more than two sentences in a row out of that boy. He’s his father’s son.” The amused look she gave him seemed to say that should be all the explanation required.
“These are the Southron Hills, just outside of the Wilds . . . though I expect you’ve gathered that much.” She gingerly wiped the back of his head, prompting a new jolt of pain to lance through him. The source of his throbbing headache, he assumed, and tried not to think too closely about how badly he might have hurt himself. “There’s no name for this place. It’s where we’ve settled for the moment, nothing more. The people in the camp have slowly banded together over time, out of necessity. Mostly they’re just trying to survive.”
“Sounds familiar,” Maric muttered. He wondered, however,
how much his life really compared to theirs. Even on the run, he and his mother had decent accommodations wherever they hid. Remote castles, abbeys tucked away in the mountains . . . There was always some nobleman willing to take them in, or someone willing to provide a spacious tent on the march. He always complained about it bitterly, about the limits he endured, the boredom and the lack of freedom. Judging from the squalor he saw here on his arrival, these people would probably consider him privileged. He probably was.
“It’s Gareth that we follow. He keeps us safe, and with each passing year there seem to be more and more of us. There is never any shortage of desperate souls with nowhere else to turn, it seems.” She dabbed at his head again, frowning with concern. “That’s Loghain’s father, if you haven’t met him.”
“I haven’t.”
“You will.” She wrung the cloth out again; this time the swirls were dark and ominous. Maric wondered if his head looked as much of a mess as it felt. “I am Sister Ailis.”
“Hyram.”
“Yes, so I hear.” The sister nodded toward his hands. “You’ll want to wash those.”
Maric glanced at his hands and saw that they were still filthy, stained practically up to his elbows with dried blood and dirt. He accepted the wet rag without comment.
“That is a great deal of blood on your hands,” she said pointedly.
“It’s not mine. Mostly.”
Her gaze was even, calculating. “And how do you feel about that?”
He wiped his hands slowly, keeping his own eyes firmly on the task. He knew what she was asking. His first instinct back in the forest had been to keep his identity secret, and it was probably the correct one. After all, Sister Ailis had said it herself: these people were desperate. Maric had no idea what the usurper would pay for him, but it was probably more than these people had ever known. You didn’t have to be poor to know that the promise of wealth could corrupt anyone. He wondered how many gold sovereigns it had taken to put that sword through his mother’s gut.
“He attacked me. I was defending myself.” His voice sounded hollow and fake, even to himself. “They killed my mother.”
Saying it out loud didn’t make it feel any more real.
The sister watched him a moment longer, her eyes sharp. “Maker watch over her,” she intoned, relenting.
Maric hesitated. “Maker watch over her,” he repeated, his voice husky with grief. Sister Ailis placed her hands on his, a gesture of understanding. He jerked his hands away more roughly than he intended, but she said nothing. For a long, awkward pause he stared at his half-cleaned hands. She took the bloodied rag from him and soaked it again.
Lamely, he changed the subject. “So if you are a priest, what are you doing here?”
The sister smiled, nodding as if this were a question she had heard many times before. “When the Maker returned to the world, He chose for Himself a bride that would be His prophet. He could have looked to the great Imperium, with its wealth and its powerful mages. He could have looked to the civilized lands of the west, or the cities of the northern coasts. But instead He looked to a barbarian people on the very edge of Thedas.”
“And thus fell the eye of the Maker upon Andraste,” Maric promptly intoned, “she who would be raised up from outcast to become His bride. From her lips would fall the Chant of Light, at her command would the legions of righteousness fall upon the world.”
“An educated man?” The sister seemed impressed, but Maric cursed his need to show off. She cradled the golden holy symbol around her neck, regarding it as one might an old friend. “People forget that Ferelden wasn’t always as it is now, the homeland of the Maker’s prophet. Once it was reviled by the civilized world.” She smiled gently, her eyes twinkling. “Sometimes that which is most precious can be found where you would least expect to.”
“But aren’t these people . . . ?”
“Criminals? Thieves? Murderers?” She shrugged. “I am here to guide them and help them with their struggle, as best I can. The things that each of them has done shall, in the end, be judged by the Maker and no one else.”
“The magisters judged Andraste in the end, after her crusade. They burned her on the cross for her troubles, you know.”
Her chuckle was amused. “Yes, I seem to recall hearing that somewhere.”
They were interrupted as Loghain marched into the hut. He was cleaner than Maric remembered, and now wore armor fashioned from studded leather straps. It looked heavy, and the great bow slung over his shoulder was intimidating. Unusually good equipment for a poacher, Maric thought to himself. Perhaps sensing the scrutiny, Loghain glared at him. Unlike with the sister, there was nothing guarded about the suspicion in his eyes. Suddenly self-conscious, Maric pulled the blanket up to cover his lack of clothing.
“So he’s decided not to sleep the entire day away,” Loghain commented dryly, not taking his gaze away from Maric.
“He is doing better,” the sister noted. She picked the water bowl off the floor. “His injuries were not inconsiderable. You did well in bringing him here, Loghain.”
His eyes flicked toward her. “We’ll see about that. Has he said anything to you?”
Maric raised his hand. “Err . . . I’m right here. . . .”
Amused, Sister Ailis arched a brow at Loghain. “Indeed. Why don’t you speak to him?”
“I intend to.” Then, to Maric: “My father wants to see you.” Not waiting for a reply, he spun on his heel and marched back out into the sunlight.
The sister motioned toward a pile of clothing in the corner of the room next to the small table. “Your boots are under the table. I’m afraid I had to burn everything else. There is nothing fancy in the pile, but I’m certain you will find something suitable.” She turned to leave.
“Sister Ailis,” Maric called out. She paused at the door, looking back, and suddenly he found himself at a loss for words.
“I wouldn’t keep Gareth waiting,” was all she said. And then she was gone.
Maric stepped out into the camp. In the bright afternoon it almost seemed like any other bustling village. Clothes were being beaten on rocks in the nearby stream, rabbit meat was being smoked at several central fires, tents were being mended by clutches of chattering women, small children were scampering underfoot. They might have been thinner and filthier than he was accustomed to, but it was not all that different from other places in Ferelden. The Orlesians were hardly the kindest rulers. There was plenty of refuse about, enough to tell him they had camped here for months. Long enough to build the hut he had just walked out of, at least. Several tough-looking men garbed mostly in rags marked Maric’s appearance and openly stared at him with chilling, calculating looks. Loghain’s fine leather armor was definitely the exception here.
Looking around, it was easy enough to spot Loghain standing not far away and speaking to a larger man that Maric assumed must be his father. The man was dressed in the same kind of studded leather armor and had the same stern glower and same black hair, though there was far less of it and far more gray at his temples. Even had he been in the same rags as the others, there would be no mistaking who led these people. Maric had known men like this all his life—the sort of men who were commanders in his mother’s army, the sort of men who breathed and lived discipline their entire lives. Odd that he should find such a man here.
Loghain finally noticed Maric standing amid the bustle and nodded so his father could see. That suspicious glare didn’t let up for a second, and Maric wondered just what he had done since last night to earn such hostility.
It’s because you lied to him and still are, he reminded himself, and also because you’re an incompetent boob.
The pair of men crossed the camp while Maric waited for them, squirming as he felt himself being sized up from afar. Right then he felt about as far away from being a king as he imagined he possibly could, cold and sore and awkward. He found himself wishing for his mother to ride in to his rescue. The Rebel Queen would have looked magnificent w
ith her golden armor, blond hair and purple cloak fluttering in the breeze. It had always been easy to see why people loved her. These poor sods would all have fallen instantly to one knee if she were here, Loghain and his father included. But she wasn’t going to come to his rescue any longer, and fanciful wishes wouldn’t make it so. Maric firmed his jaw and did not avoid the two sets of icy blue eyes looking his way.
“Hyram.” Gareth offered a friendly hand in greeting. Maric shook it and was immediately aware just how strong the man was. Gareth was hardly young, but Maric was certain Loghain’s father could have folded him in half and tossed him about like a small child, and would hardly have worked up a sweat doing so.
“Umm, yes,” he gulped. “Hello. You must be Gareth?”
“That I am.” Gareth scratched his chin, staring down at Maric as if he were a curiosity. Loghain stood a step behind, his expression now decidedly neutral. “My son tells me you ran into a bit of trouble near Lothering. You were being chased by Bann Ceorlic’s men.”
“There were others, too, but yes.”
He nodded slowly. “How many were there, exactly?”
“I’m not sure. It seemed like a lot.”
“All in the forest? Bann Ceorlic’s not even from these parts. Do you know why they were there?”
“No,” Maric lied. The lie hung there while they stared at him, Loghain’s eyes narrowing further. Apparently Maric could add “terrible liar” to his list of flaws. Not something he would consider a very kingly virtue, had his mother not constantly told him that the complete opposite was true. Suddenly his throat felt dry and scratchy, but he stood his ground. “They chased me after they killed my friend.”