Amaranthine Spring
Title: Amaranthine Spring
Game: Dragon Age Origins
Pairing: Ser Cauthrien/Nathaniel Howe
Rating: T
Wordcount: 6,903
Warnings: None
Summary: Spring in Amaranthine is cold, damp, and miserable, but it's better than a stone cell. Serving the Wardens is not like serving Ferelden, but it's a start. (ff.net & Ao3)
Notes: Beta'd by smaragdina. Prequel to Chevalier Games and Ash Warriors. Can either be read with shippy tendencies or as gen.
When they first met, it was an Amaranthine spring just beginning - not so cold as the southern lands but far wetter, bitter and insinuating and aching - and she wasn't what he expected.
No, that wasn't true. It wasn't the first time they had met and it wasn't just that she was other than he expected - she wasn't what he remembered. He remembered a proud and strong woman with eyes like steel. He remembered a straight back beneath pounds and pounds of armor. He remembered unflinching stoicism as she waited for her lord's attentions and orders. But it had been many years since he had seen her in passing during the days of the Landsmeet, before he'd been sent to the Free Marches and back when he still knew his father's heart, or at least believed that he did. Then, she hadn't even been a knight. Then, she had only been a soldier.
Now she was neither.
She was wasted beneath the shapeless woolens she wore, her shoulders bowed beneath her heavy, ratty cloak. Her wrists her bound before her and it was only the smallest mercy that she was not led into Vigil's Keep on a chain lead. Her eyes were downcast, the skin around them paper-thin and shadowed with exhaustion. There was still a martial echo in her step and in how her shoulders bowed but did not sink, but it was worn down.
Ten months. Ten months in the palace prison and in Fort Drakon, waiting on a sentence that never seemed to come. Ten months locked away once the Blight was quelled, rotting in a cell, because King Alistair struggled without Anora's aid to govern a hemorrhaging country. And now she was passed over to him to deal with.
Nathaniel Howe rubbed at the tension gathering between his brows and turned away from the yard, slipping into the shadows along the keep walls and through the door that stood slightly ajar. He would meet her as he should, in uniform and awaiting in the hall that had once been his father's.
--
Cauthrien tried to think back to the last time she had been in Amaranthine. It was an easier passtime as she was led into the assembly hall than counting the stones of the floor or the walls, a welcome relief from the usual monotony. Her fingers were frozen, her wrists chafed but blessedly numb. The cold damp had wormed its way through the unfitted layers of wool to sink into her skin and wind around her bones, and old injuries ached, but at least she could walk forward more than fifteen paces before she had to turn around. Each blessing, no matter how small, had to be counted and acknowledged - else she would have little to call her own, or to call good.
She had been caged by people instead of walls for the two week ride through the dismal northeastern rains, but those rains were the rains of home and of the open air. Camp smelled of animal tallow and men and sweat and mud, but they were familiar smells. She preferred them to the unending smell of stone. A latrine was better than a chamberpot. Little privacy trumped isolation. And most of all, an end was better than waiting.
It had been the height of spring when the Blight had been quelled and her usefulness outlived. She could no longer count the days, but it was near planting again. It should not have taken a year for Alistair - for her king, she reminded herself with exhausted certainty - to decide her fate. There was only distrust and distaste to blame. Anora, too, was imprisoned somewhere, and Cauthrien could only hope that Anora at least had her rooms, had her books and maps and a window. The queen - former queen - deserved at least that. And Cauthrien-
Well, perhaps she had deserved days and weeks and months with no company but herself and the specter of guilt, of failed duty and crimes committed.
She had expected execution or exile, but the wait had gone on for so long she had begun to fear she imagined freedom. Contact had come in food delivered twice a day by unseen hands that also took the bucket holding her waste. There were no words exchanged. There had been a single afternoon when she had been escorted to Fort Drakon, walked through the streets without comment. And aside from that, nothing. Nothing except counting the stones of the floor and the walls and the ceiling, of pacing, of forcing herself through the smallest exercises she was allowed in an attempt to remain herself.
Cauthrien carried a sword. Cauthrien served her country. Cauthrien was the shield of Ferelden.
Some other woman wasted away in that cell, and dreamed of a knight who could wear the crown's coat of arms and march before an army.
And some other woman walked through halls - how long had it been? How long had it been? A year? Two? More? - towards a purpose and a death sentence.
There was a great fire blazing in the center of the hall, and the waves of heat rolling from it made her fingers prick and sting. Behind it, through it, she could see figures, but her guard did not let her round the flame. She waited. She had grown very skilled at waiting, no matter how she had grown to abhor it, and now she stayed still with her hands before her and her eyes on the rim of the fire pit, wondering if she should count tiles or if she should try to remember why and when she had last been here.
Fifteen years old, on her father's farm, in southern Amaranthine-
"Ser Cauthrien." Her name came from across the flames, and she lifted her head, peering through. It was an echo of the past, dancing off the stone walls she had once been in, or maybe twice. The voice was not one she knew in particulars; in notes and flavor, she knew it all too well.
But that a Howe was in Amaranthine-
Her jaw tightened and she forced the thought down. It was not her place to question. Perhaps, if she could pass whatever test these Grey Wardens would have for her, she would have time to ask. Until then, she could only state what she knew.
"Cauthrien," she said, words hoarse and clipped from ill-use. "I have no title."
"None but sister," the Howe replied, and she was ever more certain of the connection. He was no Rendon Howe - Rendon Howe had lain in pieces, bleeding out on his dungeon floor. She had seen it, had given the first orders to clean up the estate while Kallian Tabris and Alistair Theirin (now king, now king) were led, beaten and battered, to Drakon. Rendon Howe was dead. Thomas Howe was dead. And so that left-
Nathaniel, the son who was not, sent to the Free Marches once without a hope of returning home.
Sister, he called her, and she frowned, cold-fogged brain sluggish to understand, to move beyond old memories.
"Leave us," Nathaniel Howe said, and she heard mutterings, heard the shifting of leather boots, heard a cough of uncertainty. If she turned, she might have seen her guard retreat. But the two weeks with them had been a silent dream, and she was content to let it evaporate in the heat of the audience chamber.
When the last of the footsteps faded away and she heard the great doors close behind her, Nathaniel spoke again. "The life of a Grey Warden is not easy. I would give you the option of a quick death now, if you would prefer it."
Death. This was her sentence - a kind of death, either physical or in identity. If she took the grey, she would be no longer Fereldan. And if she died, then she would die. But she would die on Fereldan soil, near enough to the land her family had once kept fields on. The idea was tempting. After a year of nothing but isolation and guilt, to come back into the bleak sun of winter with no weapon in her hand and no armor upon her shoulders, no responsibilities or trust from her people…
The idea was tempting.
"Our King would allow it?"
"Our King knows what may come to pass. It is an acceptable alternative."
Cauthrien stared into the fire. The heat was growing unbearable and her muscles ached, her skin screamed. She was still weak, miles away from what she had been, and she wondered if the Wardens could even find a use for her. This was her death sentence - and she would live or die within it. She could die without Ferelden, or serve something in its place.
Cauthrien, the woman who had stepped aside at the Landsmeet, the woman who could not have been in that cell for so many months, would have chosen death.
Instead, she only asked, "What will be my trial?"
"What we have done since the first."
--
She survived. He had known she would, had remembered her strength all those years ago and decided that the Taint would not claim her. Of course, knowing did not decide the truth, and when he had raised the cup to her lips and seen her pale and shudder at the taste of corrupted blood, when he had watched her eyes roll back white into her skull, there had been a moment of fear.
When her weakened body crumpled to the carpeted stone, there had been a darker twist of guilt. The Warden had left her alive, but he, a temporary stand-in for Ferelden's Warden Commander, watched as her life twisted and turned in the winds of fate.
She drew breath, and he let himself relax.
--
Cauthrien woke alone.
The walls were stone, and as she lay on her side, she counted each block. Her head ached and her throat and tongue felt coated with slime, a foul ooze that snaked through her. There were fifty eight stones ringing the door-
The door.
The door was different. The door was not the door to her cell, with the gate at the bottom for food and waste. This door was not metal, but was rich wood instead, and was lit by sun streaming in through a window. In her cell, the only light had come through the slots at the base of the door and from the ever-glowing dim magelight mounted in the high ceiling where she couldn't reach.
She let out a shuddering exhale and rolled onto her back.
The ceiling above her was far wider and higher than her cell's had ever been, and it, too, was lit by diffused sunlight. There was a second doorway, its framing stones shadowed and lit, its interior a warm dark. A glance to her left showed the window itself, rimmed in condensation and murky, but a window. She closed her eyes with a smile on her lips, and stayed like that until sleep took her once more.
--
A night and a morning had passed with no word from Cauthrien, and Nathaniel could sit at his blighted desk no longer. It was a simple matter: a Grey Warden newly made, under his orders and in his charge, was silent in her room. She had been weak when she arrived, and though the Taint had spared her, the worry he felt was normal. It had nothing to do with stories told of her infrequently in the Free Marches, attached to grander stories - Orlesian, almost all of them - about Loghain Mac Tir. It had nothing to do with distant memories.
And it had nothing to do with the fact that she had known his father, and had not arrived in time to stay the Warden's blade.
He had come to terms with what his father had done. Kallian had made sure of that, in her brief time in Amaranthine. She had made him a Warden and she had enlightened him, and she had done it all while saving his home, his land, his people. If Cauthrien had reached the estate in time, his father might still be alive - and Kallian may have died. The Blight could have continued to rage. So many things would have been different, and he wasn't sure he wanted any of them.
Nathaniel moved through the halls of the keep - his keep, and not his keep - quickly, avoiding the library, the path down to the practice yard. It felt empty these days, with Kallian gone, Anders gone, Velanna gone, Justice gone. Even the man who had replaced Kallian was gone, taking many of his men with him. There was only the barest skeleton of a post in Amaranthine now, hardly better than when Kallian had first arrived. That was the reason he checked on her; they needed all the hands they could get.
Her door was shut, and he knocked after only a moment's hesitation. "Cauthrien?" he called, head inclined towards the wood.
"I'm here," she responded, and her voice was nearly lost through the wood. He tried the latch and the door edged open enough for him to slip inside.
Cauthrien was sitting in the center of the room, on the Antivan rug stretched over the stone, legs crossed and hands braced behind her. Her face was upturned to the ceiling, and she didn't move as she glanced to him. Empty dishes sat nearby, and though she looked wan and wasted still - especially now that she had shed the heaviest of her woolens and sat in trousers and shirt - the dark circles under her eyes had lessened.
"The humming. Does it ever stop?" she asked.
"No. But you learn to ignore it. It becomes a part of everyday sounds and fades to the background except for when you need it or when they threaten." He settled against the doorframe. "Are you well?"
Cauthrien didn't respond, instead looking back to the ceiling. Her lips moved. He had learned to read speech from afar or in silence long before he went to the Marches, spying on his father or his siblings. It was a game he had once played with Delilah, communicating without a spoken word. One hundred twenty two, Cauthrien was saying. One hundred twenty three.
She was counting the ceiling stones.
"Come. It is a better day than we can hope for in the next month," he said, pushing away from the wall. "Your guard brought some of your old effects with you - boots, arming jackets, the like. Dress. I want you to show me what you can do in the yard." When she didn't move, he sighed silently, rubbing at the bridge of his nose. "You have taken the Joining. See it as a second knighthood. On your feet, if you will."
That brought her back, made her tilt her chin down and look at him. Her gaze was nearly empty, almost blank, and for a moment he wondered if the Taint had broken her. But then she nodded.
"Yes, ser."
The change was remarkable. She was on her feet in the space of a breath, moving to the canvas bag that had been left at the foot of her bed. He turned away as she began to sort through her few belongings, but not before he saw her thumb a pair of buckskin leggings in wonder. Ten months. It had been ten months since she had seen these parts of her life - of her. It felt… odd, to be the one to give them back.
He stared at the wall and counted stones to distract himself.
"Howe."
"Nathaniel or Commander. We give up our families in the Grey Wardens," he corrected, the words practiced and over-used, the flinch at hearing his family name all too normal and all but habit. "But yes?"
There was the slide of laces through leather. "My armor is here."
"It is, yes."
"But my sword-" There was pain there, strangled and forced down. His gaze fell to his feet and he began to count the stone tiles instead.
"They brought no weapons," he said, when no more words or sounds came from her. "We will provide for you."
Cauthrien didn't respond, but he heard the creak as she tightened her boots. He could follow her actions without having to see them, the rustle of fabric as she pulled her shirt over her head, the soft slide of toggles through fingers and loops. The soft shifting sound was her hands smoothed over her hair, followed by the squeak of a leather thong pulled tight.
And then, footsteps, measured and a little stronger than the night before, coming to him, passed him, to the door.
"To the yard, then?" she asked, her voice controlled and flat and hiding whatever injury she suffered.
He nodded, turning to her and following her out. Her arming jacket hung too loose on her shoulders, but that and how she had pulled her hair back - longer now than he could imagine her liking - made her seem more like the woman he had expected. He led her through the halls and down the stairs out to one of the practice fields. The soil was damp, nearly mud, with footprints all through it from morning drills. But they were alone.
Nathaniel crossed the open space to the rack of practice weapons. There was no squelch of sodden dirt behind him, and he paused, one hand on the pommel of a wooden sword, and looked back to her.
She looked lost. For all the renewed strength in her shoulders, for all that she looked alert, she looked lost. She looked around the yard as if she had never seen one before, and he wondered at just how much damage those ten months had done to her.
"Cauthrien?" he called, and she looked to him. She opened her mouth to speak, but again there was only silence. He hoped she wouldn't begin to count stones again.
She didn't. She closed her mouth, frowned, and then sighed with a great bowing of her shoulders before crossing the yard, boots squelching in the earth.
"Where do we start?" she asked when she was beside him, looking at the practice weapons.
"Can you hold a sword?" He tried to make the question light, but his concern was all too genuine. Ten months without holding a sword, and Maker knew what else she had been through in that time. Her jacket no longer fit, and her boots were tugged tight to fit her calves in a way that looked unnatural.
And Cauthrien knew it better than he. "If I can't, then I am of no use to you," she replied, bitterness tinging her words, fingers flexing to fists at her sides. It was only with hesitation that she reached out to touch the oiled hilt, two fingers along the wood.
She could not be left like this, not with who she had been, and not with what she had become.
"If you can't," he said, picking up the blade and holding the weapon out to her, "then we start there."
--
The last time she remembered eating as much and as often as she did in her first weeks at Vigil's Keep was when she had just joined the army. Even then, fifteen and gangly and strong from years of hard work clearing and tilling land since she was old enough to walk and hold a broken hoe, she had scrabbled to keep up with her sword lessons and everything else. She had eaten everything in sight, and years of being chronically underfed left her unable to gauge how much was too much. She'd gotten sick more than once.
Now, her stomach seemed bottomless. Sigrun had told her on the second night that it was normal, that it was just a symptom of the Taint, and then had taken the remaining piece of braised ox tail with a grin.
Her recovery was at times unbearably slow. She would wake in the morning in her bed, and would count the stones on the ceiling until she reached thirty three, remembered that ten months had passed in Fort Drakon, and told herself again that it was over. It would take her through breakfast to truly believe that those months and the weeks after it marching through the frigid rain were past.
And then there was a sword in her hand (but not her sword, a part of her would whisper, and the ache would persist) and she worked to relearn the weight of armor. That was when it was the easiest.
But that was also when the guilt wormed its way in.
Those ten months had given her a lot of time to think - and to stop thinking. It was only as she pushed her way across the practice field, meeting wooden swords with an Orlesian Warden or dodging Sigrun's hard and fast strikes, that the old pain came back, surfacing from the more recent numbness. She had failed Ferelden, and her lord, and now-
She focused on the idea of redemption. She was a Grey Warden, and she could do little else than fight.
--
He watched.
As acting commander, he couldn't spend as much time as he wanted with her- or with any of the rest. Sigrun banged on his door and he sent her away with apologies. She nicked his knives for the trouble, then left an apple with an arrow through it on his desk along with a book. He hadn't had time to read it, but he took the time to eat the fruit.
But he did watch Cauthrien, when he could. At meals, in the yard, he watched as she took her recovery into her own hands. He'd put a sword in her hand and showed her that she still remembered how to wield it. She could go from there.
Warden Cauthrien. Sister. He hadn't ever imagined he would call her that, or have an occasion to call her anything. He had his brief memories, his stories, and the stories of Kallian. In Kallian's stories, Cauthrien loomed as terrifying figure, the woman who had beaten her and the king down and dragged them off to Fort Drakon - and she was a tragic figure, stepping aside at the Landsmeet doors.
Rumors from the war painted her in brighter strokes: strict and harsh and cracking beneath the pressure of Loghain's rule. And then, imprisoned and forgotten, a relic of a war already won, an enemy with no teeth or claws to threaten.
And he saw it come back in pieces. The set of her shoulders, the expression she wore when she spoke to Sigrun or the other Wardens, the way she could shout an order in the yard and have even Orlesians following it.
But she still came to breakfast late and almost bewildered every morning, or every other morning, and that was why he kept watching. He worried.
--
When Nathaniel Howe, Commander of the Grey of Ferelden came to meals with them all, he always sat near her.
She tried not to read too much into it. He had given her the Joining, and he had dragged her from her room the next morning. Beyond that, they interacted little. But his words clung to her: Then we start there. He had worked her until the day was nearly gone despite how her broken body ached at it. They had started there.
And she was getting- somewhere.
That somewhere ached and stung and howled when she saw him too early in the morning, before dreams had entirely faded. The hook of his nose undid whatever kindnesses he paid her in those hazy hours. Counting stones remained unavoidable as the days wore on. His father's actions had put her in Drakon, actions she could have stopped, and the planes of his face, the timbre of his voice, reminded her at every step.
She tried not to think about it.
Luckily, he often took his breakfast in his office. When he sat beside her at dinner, it was with a polite nod and a slight smile. That night was no different, and when their wordless, meaningless greeting had been exchanged, she turned back to finishing off the rabbit stew laid out before her.
"How is your training?" Nathaniel asked, and she looked up, startled. He almost never spoke to her. And when he did- Rendon's voice echoed.
She hid it beneath the lingering numbness of Drakon. "Well enough."
"... I sent a query to Denerim asking after your sword," he said, gaze sliding over hers and coming to rest on the squares of honeycomb, taken from wintering hives, set out in small dishes along the table.
She stared at it in turn, working up the courage for a simple breath of, "And?"
"I'm sorry."
Cauthrien swallowed, then closed her eyes, bowing her head. "To be expected."
"Somebody sold it to a collector. The king wasn't aware of this until he passed the sentence, else he would have sent it with you. I'm sorry."
It was gone. Her chest tightened and she pushed aside the stew. The Summer Sword, her last piece of Loghain from when he was good and bright and strong, sold. Of course it was sold. So little remained of what came before, except the gnawing guilt, and-
She pushed away from the table. "It's to be expected," she repeated, and left the room, counting paces until she could find a spot to sit and count stones.
--
They were sitting in the armory; he pulled on leather straps and replaced those that were too weakened to trust, and she mended mail. Nearly three weeks gone by since she had arrived, and from the looks of it, her fingers were regaining their old dexterity, their old callouses. Nearly three weeks gone by, and she was still closed off.
He wasn't doing a very good job of being Commander of the Grey, by the standard Kallian Tabris had set. No wonder that Weisshaupt was sending a replacement.
But Cauthrien was alive and he could do a better job than he'd been doing this last month. He had asked her to help him inventory their spare armor. It would be easier, in private. And it was a conversation to be had alone. He remembered the frozen pain on her face when he'd given her news he likely should never have spoken of. He had made a mistake.
He would fix it.
He cleared his throat. "So, tell me."
"Tell you what, Howe?" She didn't glance up from her work, though the muscles in her jaw clenched a moment, her heel shifted against the ground to brace her better, as if preparing for an attack. They had barely spoken beyond orders and requests since the day after her Joining, but he had learned the little signs of her irritation, of her attention, of her distance. She was present. And she was displeased.
Well, so was he. He scowled. "Cauthrien," he warned, then shook his head. No, now was no time to bristle at his family's name, or the way she said it. She was loyal and good; her prejudices did not color her work. But her past did. "Tell me about Ostagar. About the war. About your time in Fort Drakon."
"Why?" Her gruffness surprised him. She had been distant, yes, but she had never been- whatever this was. Nathaniel set down his work and, in place of pinching the bridge of his nose, set his hands behind him to take his weight.
He had decided to do this, and so he would. "If the Warden taught me one thing - it's the importance of having somebody who will listen. So if you want to talk about Loghain-"
"You talked to her about Rendon?"
"I-" It was a barb, a taunt, he was sure of it. He nearly rose to his feet and left the room. But instead he sighed and gave in to the urge to rub at the tension building between his brows. "... I almost killed her for it. But yes, eventually."
"Then you know about what he did. And you know about the war." There was a flicker of anger across her face, and then she yanked hard with the pliers she held and the link she worked at snapped. She bit back a curse.
"Is it so bad?" he asked, rolling forward into a crouch.
"I did a lot of things I regret. Can we move on?"
"Can you?"
She looked up and met his eyes, lips parted for another defensive retort. None came.
He leaned forward across the space separating them and took the mail from her. She did not clutch it. She yielded, and he sighed. "I live in the shadow of the deeds of my father. You live in the shadow of the deeds of Loghain. It is comparable enough, and I have moved on. So will you."
She turned from him then, brow furrowed and jaw tense, and said only,
"As you say."
--
"Aim for the target, Cauthrien," Nathaniel barked, and Cauthrien flinched, loosing her arrow too early. It went wide from the straw darkspawn, and she all but threw her bow to the ground.
"You handle arrows, Howe," she said, and he was over to her in an instant, wrenching the bow from her grip. She stood proud and unflinching, jaw clenched. It had been like this, ever since that evening in the armory. Move on taunted her, as did him, his nose, the constant reminder of the now ever-present thought of her failure. It returned with greater fervor each day, with the weight of a weapon in her hand.
He had made her a Warden and given her a job and brought her back to life. It would destroy her.
He didn't step away once he had the bow out of her hands and unstrung. He stayed in her space and she glared in return.
"I will, and you will sit in this Keep and stay off the field because you refuse to do your job," he growled.
Her upper lip curled.
A month ago, he had been there to pull her from her room, had showed her she could still hold a sword. He had given her a life, and to have a life - to be Cauthrien again - meant she had to remember what had gone before. She had to see it all erased or twisted, a bow in her hands and a different cause at her back. And he had been the one to lift the chalice to her lips and breathe life back into her.
Maker damn him.
And Nathaniel moved even closer, lips pressed to a thin line as he met her gaze, her squared shoulders, her lifted chin.
"Or," he continued at a growl, "you will stop this madness, comport yourself like a soldier, and learn how to use a bow for more than cloud shooting. Do you understand? And you will call me commander or Nathaniel or brother. I am not a Howe any longer. Just as you are not a Fereldan knight."
She snarled, lashing out and striking him across the cheek. She was barehanded save for the leather glove on her right hand, and so it did not break skin as it would have in armor. But it knocked him away and made his face contort in turn.
"I serve Ferelden," she growled, just as he surged forward, casting the bow aside and grabbing for her wrist, her shoulder. He tried to catch her and still her; she brought her knee up, aiming for soft flesh or weak joint, but he caught her leg. She tried to break the hold, but he spun and pulled her down, and she cried out as she hit the cold, muddy earth.
Cauthrien caught his hair and he caught her waist and she clawed at him, struck at him, and he returned in each in kind. Once, he nearly pinned her, dragging her back against him, and he hissed in her ear, "You are a Warden," but then she elbowed him in the kidneys and broke away as he coughed and sputtered. Her fury clouded her thoughts and sharpened her vision, strengthened her hands and quickened her limbs, and she fell upon him. He shoved a boot into her stomach. She caught his arm and wrenched.
They were a tangle on the ground, all mud and sweat and anger. His knuckles caught her cheek, she nearly broke his ribs, and when she laughed it was broken and low and he got an arm around her throat and shoved his knee against the small of her back and pushed, pushed her into the mud until she shot an arm back and caught him in the jaw with her elbow. He fell back and she scrambled halfway to her feet.
She stared at him.
He stared back.
He was bleeding from a split lip, his face growing swollen, and her muscles trembled and her bones ached. Too tired to stay up, she sank back down and waited for the next assault.
It didn't come.
--
"Careful," she said as she wiped the grime and dried blood from his mouth. He glowered, then gave up and just leaned against the wall at his back, looking up at the greying sky. It would be Summerday soon, and this miserable weather would finally break. There would be warmth and some measure of dry, and he would stop daydreaming of years spent in Antiva and the northern reaches of the Marches and wish instead for the days of his childhood.
It was easier to think about that then the rest of it, Cauthrien just as bruised and dirty as he was, the victor tending to the wounds of the fallen. Some commander, he thought, and choked down a painful, dry laugh.
"I said careful," Cauthrien muttered, and moved to clean the cut on his forehead.
"And were you careful when you struck me?"
"And were you careful when you insulted me?" She kept his gaze now, exhausted though she was. Her hands trembled against him, and when she sat back it was with a heaviness he knew from after hard battles and long practices.
"It needed to be said." Nathaniel shrugged, then winced. She hit hard; her recovery, then, was certainly going well. He had only meant to stop the fight before it moved any further, but she had evaded and brought him down.
And now she was peering at him, fingers twisted in the cloth she held. "You truly believe you're not a Howe anymore?"
He shoved a mass of mud-clodded hair out of his face. "I try to. It does not always hold true, but I try. It is what we do. We give up family and home for a new purpose. You knew that when you took the Joining. You could have chosen death."
"I could have." She scrubbed at the dirt caking her knees and hands, picking at it with her fingers. "Maybe I should have."
"But you didn't," he reminded her, and he reached out to take her elbow. "Remember that. You made your decision. Did you never regret joining the army?"
She looked down to his hand, then let him guide her with just a lack of pressure to the wall beside him. She settled against it, drawing her legs up to her chest. They both looked out to the yard, the ground torn up and scarred from where they had been. The bow had been put away, clean cloth and water retrieved, but nothing else had changed.
Except that she was listening.
"At first, yes," she said at last. "Not because it wasn't what I thought it would be like - but because it was everything I thought it would be like. And I had to leave home for it all. I left home to be humiliated, hurt, pushed to my limits, and then rebuilt a different person."
"You were young, weren't you?" At her questioning frown, he shrugged the less painful shoulder. "They tell stories of you."
"Of course they do," she sighed, and looked up to the sky. He followed her gaze though he had already marked the weather a hundred times over. More rain. They sat in silence until he thought she had forgotten his question, or had decided to never answer. And then she exhaled, long and winding, and her lips twitched into a faint smile. "I was fifteen. Not young, but young enough. I would have been betrothed in another year."
He almost asked did you know to whom, but he stopped short. He focused on his task. It was hard with his ears still ringing and his jaw aching, but he was trying to set her straight again. He was trying to fix her, like Kallian had done to everybody she ever came across.
"Then this is the same," he said. "You would have been dead in another year. Instead you're here. And you will be rebuilt again."
His hand was still on her arm, and he frowned at it, then let her go.
"And you?" she asked, pulling his eyes back up. She was dirt-stained and tired and still too-thin, but her eyes were bright and focused. She was more there than she had been since she arrived.
She was the woman he remembered and expected.
"Me?"
"Living in your father's shadow. Your father-"
"Did horrible things, I am aware," he said with a wave of his hand and a clenched jaw. "I have moved on as best I can."
"Your father made my life a living nightmare for almost a year," she said. "He brought this country down around me. He took the last shreds of sanity Loghain had left, and he unravelled all of them. His personal proclivities were the least of it, Nathaniel." He flinched, but she continued on without pause, "And I know all of that. If we speak of moving on, then can you move on, knowing that I know that, and will never forget it, or forgive it of him?"
Her eyes were wide and a deep grey, and she seemed too innocent to be asking that of him, to be dredging up old insecurities and pain. She opened old scars, and his shoulders hunched. He folded in on himself. But he did not look away.
"I will have to," he said.
She nodded. It was a slow, thoughtful thing, and he relaxed just a little at the thought that he was getting through. His soul ached with old injuries, but if the baring of them soothed hers-
"You are not your father," she said, and reached out to touch his shoulder.
"And you only did what you thought was best," he responded, though his voice wavered at first. Not your father, from a woman who had truly known him-
He had thought he was beyond those fears, but the reassurance soothed something deep and festering. It didn't go away; the flame of it did not burn away the dark. But it was something.
"I tried," she agreed, voice dropping to a whisper as she looked away.
"What happened?" If he shifted closer to her it was because the yard was growing frigid as the sun went down. But it was also because she was his focus, his goal, and he was finally seeing the woman he had heard stories of and looked on with admiration and almost adoration as a boy.
Her lips, thin and warped by pain and age, quirked. "A lot of things," she murmured.
He leaned forward just enough to catch her gaze again. It made his back scream and his stomach ache, but he wanted to see her. He wanted her to look on him.
"I mean in the in-between. Fort Drakon until now."
She laughed, and it was dry and cracked and ended in a cough. But she uncurled where she sat and leaned languid against the stone behind them.
"I was gone," Cauthrien said. "Ten months in a room with no passage of time, and not enough room to move, and all I could do was count stones and forget myself. You and your blasted duty brought me back. With everything that includes."
"And what will you do with that?"
She shrugged and smiled, thin and faint but undeniably there. "Continue to serve, I suppose. Continue moving."
That was the moment where the sun should have broken through the cloud cover, blinding red in the sunset, but it was spring in Amaranthine. The clouds remained unbroken, and the ground remained wet and cold. He smiled all the same.
"Good," he said, and then stood despite the twinges and aches and pains. He held out a hand.
She took it.
Game: Dragon Age Origins
Pairing: Ser Cauthrien/Nathaniel Howe
Rating: T
Wordcount: 6,903
Warnings: None
Summary: Spring in Amaranthine is cold, damp, and miserable, but it's better than a stone cell. Serving the Wardens is not like serving Ferelden, but it's a start. (ff.net & Ao3)
Notes: Beta'd by smaragdina. Prequel to Chevalier Games and Ash Warriors. Can either be read with shippy tendencies or as gen.
When they first met, it was an Amaranthine spring just beginning - not so cold as the southern lands but far wetter, bitter and insinuating and aching - and she wasn't what he expected.
No, that wasn't true. It wasn't the first time they had met and it wasn't just that she was other than he expected - she wasn't what he remembered. He remembered a proud and strong woman with eyes like steel. He remembered a straight back beneath pounds and pounds of armor. He remembered unflinching stoicism as she waited for her lord's attentions and orders. But it had been many years since he had seen her in passing during the days of the Landsmeet, before he'd been sent to the Free Marches and back when he still knew his father's heart, or at least believed that he did. Then, she hadn't even been a knight. Then, she had only been a soldier.
Now she was neither.
She was wasted beneath the shapeless woolens she wore, her shoulders bowed beneath her heavy, ratty cloak. Her wrists her bound before her and it was only the smallest mercy that she was not led into Vigil's Keep on a chain lead. Her eyes were downcast, the skin around them paper-thin and shadowed with exhaustion. There was still a martial echo in her step and in how her shoulders bowed but did not sink, but it was worn down.
Ten months. Ten months in the palace prison and in Fort Drakon, waiting on a sentence that never seemed to come. Ten months locked away once the Blight was quelled, rotting in a cell, because King Alistair struggled without Anora's aid to govern a hemorrhaging country. And now she was passed over to him to deal with.
Nathaniel Howe rubbed at the tension gathering between his brows and turned away from the yard, slipping into the shadows along the keep walls and through the door that stood slightly ajar. He would meet her as he should, in uniform and awaiting in the hall that had once been his father's.
--
Cauthrien tried to think back to the last time she had been in Amaranthine. It was an easier passtime as she was led into the assembly hall than counting the stones of the floor or the walls, a welcome relief from the usual monotony. Her fingers were frozen, her wrists chafed but blessedly numb. The cold damp had wormed its way through the unfitted layers of wool to sink into her skin and wind around her bones, and old injuries ached, but at least she could walk forward more than fifteen paces before she had to turn around. Each blessing, no matter how small, had to be counted and acknowledged - else she would have little to call her own, or to call good.
She had been caged by people instead of walls for the two week ride through the dismal northeastern rains, but those rains were the rains of home and of the open air. Camp smelled of animal tallow and men and sweat and mud, but they were familiar smells. She preferred them to the unending smell of stone. A latrine was better than a chamberpot. Little privacy trumped isolation. And most of all, an end was better than waiting.
It had been the height of spring when the Blight had been quelled and her usefulness outlived. She could no longer count the days, but it was near planting again. It should not have taken a year for Alistair - for her king, she reminded herself with exhausted certainty - to decide her fate. There was only distrust and distaste to blame. Anora, too, was imprisoned somewhere, and Cauthrien could only hope that Anora at least had her rooms, had her books and maps and a window. The queen - former queen - deserved at least that. And Cauthrien-
Well, perhaps she had deserved days and weeks and months with no company but herself and the specter of guilt, of failed duty and crimes committed.
She had expected execution or exile, but the wait had gone on for so long she had begun to fear she imagined freedom. Contact had come in food delivered twice a day by unseen hands that also took the bucket holding her waste. There were no words exchanged. There had been a single afternoon when she had been escorted to Fort Drakon, walked through the streets without comment. And aside from that, nothing. Nothing except counting the stones of the floor and the walls and the ceiling, of pacing, of forcing herself through the smallest exercises she was allowed in an attempt to remain herself.
Cauthrien carried a sword. Cauthrien served her country. Cauthrien was the shield of Ferelden.
Some other woman wasted away in that cell, and dreamed of a knight who could wear the crown's coat of arms and march before an army.
And some other woman walked through halls - how long had it been? How long had it been? A year? Two? More? - towards a purpose and a death sentence.
There was a great fire blazing in the center of the hall, and the waves of heat rolling from it made her fingers prick and sting. Behind it, through it, she could see figures, but her guard did not let her round the flame. She waited. She had grown very skilled at waiting, no matter how she had grown to abhor it, and now she stayed still with her hands before her and her eyes on the rim of the fire pit, wondering if she should count tiles or if she should try to remember why and when she had last been here.
Fifteen years old, on her father's farm, in southern Amaranthine-
"Ser Cauthrien." Her name came from across the flames, and she lifted her head, peering through. It was an echo of the past, dancing off the stone walls she had once been in, or maybe twice. The voice was not one she knew in particulars; in notes and flavor, she knew it all too well.
But that a Howe was in Amaranthine-
Her jaw tightened and she forced the thought down. It was not her place to question. Perhaps, if she could pass whatever test these Grey Wardens would have for her, she would have time to ask. Until then, she could only state what she knew.
"Cauthrien," she said, words hoarse and clipped from ill-use. "I have no title."
"None but sister," the Howe replied, and she was ever more certain of the connection. He was no Rendon Howe - Rendon Howe had lain in pieces, bleeding out on his dungeon floor. She had seen it, had given the first orders to clean up the estate while Kallian Tabris and Alistair Theirin (now king, now king) were led, beaten and battered, to Drakon. Rendon Howe was dead. Thomas Howe was dead. And so that left-
Nathaniel, the son who was not, sent to the Free Marches once without a hope of returning home.
Sister, he called her, and she frowned, cold-fogged brain sluggish to understand, to move beyond old memories.
"Leave us," Nathaniel Howe said, and she heard mutterings, heard the shifting of leather boots, heard a cough of uncertainty. If she turned, she might have seen her guard retreat. But the two weeks with them had been a silent dream, and she was content to let it evaporate in the heat of the audience chamber.
When the last of the footsteps faded away and she heard the great doors close behind her, Nathaniel spoke again. "The life of a Grey Warden is not easy. I would give you the option of a quick death now, if you would prefer it."
Death. This was her sentence - a kind of death, either physical or in identity. If she took the grey, she would be no longer Fereldan. And if she died, then she would die. But she would die on Fereldan soil, near enough to the land her family had once kept fields on. The idea was tempting. After a year of nothing but isolation and guilt, to come back into the bleak sun of winter with no weapon in her hand and no armor upon her shoulders, no responsibilities or trust from her people…
The idea was tempting.
"Our King would allow it?"
"Our King knows what may come to pass. It is an acceptable alternative."
Cauthrien stared into the fire. The heat was growing unbearable and her muscles ached, her skin screamed. She was still weak, miles away from what she had been, and she wondered if the Wardens could even find a use for her. This was her death sentence - and she would live or die within it. She could die without Ferelden, or serve something in its place.
Cauthrien, the woman who had stepped aside at the Landsmeet, the woman who could not have been in that cell for so many months, would have chosen death.
Instead, she only asked, "What will be my trial?"
"What we have done since the first."
--
She survived. He had known she would, had remembered her strength all those years ago and decided that the Taint would not claim her. Of course, knowing did not decide the truth, and when he had raised the cup to her lips and seen her pale and shudder at the taste of corrupted blood, when he had watched her eyes roll back white into her skull, there had been a moment of fear.
When her weakened body crumpled to the carpeted stone, there had been a darker twist of guilt. The Warden had left her alive, but he, a temporary stand-in for Ferelden's Warden Commander, watched as her life twisted and turned in the winds of fate.
She drew breath, and he let himself relax.
--
Cauthrien woke alone.
The walls were stone, and as she lay on her side, she counted each block. Her head ached and her throat and tongue felt coated with slime, a foul ooze that snaked through her. There were fifty eight stones ringing the door-
The door.
The door was different. The door was not the door to her cell, with the gate at the bottom for food and waste. This door was not metal, but was rich wood instead, and was lit by sun streaming in through a window. In her cell, the only light had come through the slots at the base of the door and from the ever-glowing dim magelight mounted in the high ceiling where she couldn't reach.
She let out a shuddering exhale and rolled onto her back.
The ceiling above her was far wider and higher than her cell's had ever been, and it, too, was lit by diffused sunlight. There was a second doorway, its framing stones shadowed and lit, its interior a warm dark. A glance to her left showed the window itself, rimmed in condensation and murky, but a window. She closed her eyes with a smile on her lips, and stayed like that until sleep took her once more.
--
A night and a morning had passed with no word from Cauthrien, and Nathaniel could sit at his blighted desk no longer. It was a simple matter: a Grey Warden newly made, under his orders and in his charge, was silent in her room. She had been weak when she arrived, and though the Taint had spared her, the worry he felt was normal. It had nothing to do with stories told of her infrequently in the Free Marches, attached to grander stories - Orlesian, almost all of them - about Loghain Mac Tir. It had nothing to do with distant memories.
And it had nothing to do with the fact that she had known his father, and had not arrived in time to stay the Warden's blade.
He had come to terms with what his father had done. Kallian had made sure of that, in her brief time in Amaranthine. She had made him a Warden and she had enlightened him, and she had done it all while saving his home, his land, his people. If Cauthrien had reached the estate in time, his father might still be alive - and Kallian may have died. The Blight could have continued to rage. So many things would have been different, and he wasn't sure he wanted any of them.
Nathaniel moved through the halls of the keep - his keep, and not his keep - quickly, avoiding the library, the path down to the practice yard. It felt empty these days, with Kallian gone, Anders gone, Velanna gone, Justice gone. Even the man who had replaced Kallian was gone, taking many of his men with him. There was only the barest skeleton of a post in Amaranthine now, hardly better than when Kallian had first arrived. That was the reason he checked on her; they needed all the hands they could get.
Her door was shut, and he knocked after only a moment's hesitation. "Cauthrien?" he called, head inclined towards the wood.
"I'm here," she responded, and her voice was nearly lost through the wood. He tried the latch and the door edged open enough for him to slip inside.
Cauthrien was sitting in the center of the room, on the Antivan rug stretched over the stone, legs crossed and hands braced behind her. Her face was upturned to the ceiling, and she didn't move as she glanced to him. Empty dishes sat nearby, and though she looked wan and wasted still - especially now that she had shed the heaviest of her woolens and sat in trousers and shirt - the dark circles under her eyes had lessened.
"The humming. Does it ever stop?" she asked.
"No. But you learn to ignore it. It becomes a part of everyday sounds and fades to the background except for when you need it or when they threaten." He settled against the doorframe. "Are you well?"
Cauthrien didn't respond, instead looking back to the ceiling. Her lips moved. He had learned to read speech from afar or in silence long before he went to the Marches, spying on his father or his siblings. It was a game he had once played with Delilah, communicating without a spoken word. One hundred twenty two, Cauthrien was saying. One hundred twenty three.
She was counting the ceiling stones.
"Come. It is a better day than we can hope for in the next month," he said, pushing away from the wall. "Your guard brought some of your old effects with you - boots, arming jackets, the like. Dress. I want you to show me what you can do in the yard." When she didn't move, he sighed silently, rubbing at the bridge of his nose. "You have taken the Joining. See it as a second knighthood. On your feet, if you will."
That brought her back, made her tilt her chin down and look at him. Her gaze was nearly empty, almost blank, and for a moment he wondered if the Taint had broken her. But then she nodded.
"Yes, ser."
The change was remarkable. She was on her feet in the space of a breath, moving to the canvas bag that had been left at the foot of her bed. He turned away as she began to sort through her few belongings, but not before he saw her thumb a pair of buckskin leggings in wonder. Ten months. It had been ten months since she had seen these parts of her life - of her. It felt… odd, to be the one to give them back.
He stared at the wall and counted stones to distract himself.
"Howe."
"Nathaniel or Commander. We give up our families in the Grey Wardens," he corrected, the words practiced and over-used, the flinch at hearing his family name all too normal and all but habit. "But yes?"
There was the slide of laces through leather. "My armor is here."
"It is, yes."
"But my sword-" There was pain there, strangled and forced down. His gaze fell to his feet and he began to count the stone tiles instead.
"They brought no weapons," he said, when no more words or sounds came from her. "We will provide for you."
Cauthrien didn't respond, but he heard the creak as she tightened her boots. He could follow her actions without having to see them, the rustle of fabric as she pulled her shirt over her head, the soft slide of toggles through fingers and loops. The soft shifting sound was her hands smoothed over her hair, followed by the squeak of a leather thong pulled tight.
And then, footsteps, measured and a little stronger than the night before, coming to him, passed him, to the door.
"To the yard, then?" she asked, her voice controlled and flat and hiding whatever injury she suffered.
He nodded, turning to her and following her out. Her arming jacket hung too loose on her shoulders, but that and how she had pulled her hair back - longer now than he could imagine her liking - made her seem more like the woman he had expected. He led her through the halls and down the stairs out to one of the practice fields. The soil was damp, nearly mud, with footprints all through it from morning drills. But they were alone.
Nathaniel crossed the open space to the rack of practice weapons. There was no squelch of sodden dirt behind him, and he paused, one hand on the pommel of a wooden sword, and looked back to her.
She looked lost. For all the renewed strength in her shoulders, for all that she looked alert, she looked lost. She looked around the yard as if she had never seen one before, and he wondered at just how much damage those ten months had done to her.
"Cauthrien?" he called, and she looked to him. She opened her mouth to speak, but again there was only silence. He hoped she wouldn't begin to count stones again.
She didn't. She closed her mouth, frowned, and then sighed with a great bowing of her shoulders before crossing the yard, boots squelching in the earth.
"Where do we start?" she asked when she was beside him, looking at the practice weapons.
"Can you hold a sword?" He tried to make the question light, but his concern was all too genuine. Ten months without holding a sword, and Maker knew what else she had been through in that time. Her jacket no longer fit, and her boots were tugged tight to fit her calves in a way that looked unnatural.
And Cauthrien knew it better than he. "If I can't, then I am of no use to you," she replied, bitterness tinging her words, fingers flexing to fists at her sides. It was only with hesitation that she reached out to touch the oiled hilt, two fingers along the wood.
She could not be left like this, not with who she had been, and not with what she had become.
"If you can't," he said, picking up the blade and holding the weapon out to her, "then we start there."
--
The last time she remembered eating as much and as often as she did in her first weeks at Vigil's Keep was when she had just joined the army. Even then, fifteen and gangly and strong from years of hard work clearing and tilling land since she was old enough to walk and hold a broken hoe, she had scrabbled to keep up with her sword lessons and everything else. She had eaten everything in sight, and years of being chronically underfed left her unable to gauge how much was too much. She'd gotten sick more than once.
Now, her stomach seemed bottomless. Sigrun had told her on the second night that it was normal, that it was just a symptom of the Taint, and then had taken the remaining piece of braised ox tail with a grin.
Her recovery was at times unbearably slow. She would wake in the morning in her bed, and would count the stones on the ceiling until she reached thirty three, remembered that ten months had passed in Fort Drakon, and told herself again that it was over. It would take her through breakfast to truly believe that those months and the weeks after it marching through the frigid rain were past.
And then there was a sword in her hand (but not her sword, a part of her would whisper, and the ache would persist) and she worked to relearn the weight of armor. That was when it was the easiest.
But that was also when the guilt wormed its way in.
Those ten months had given her a lot of time to think - and to stop thinking. It was only as she pushed her way across the practice field, meeting wooden swords with an Orlesian Warden or dodging Sigrun's hard and fast strikes, that the old pain came back, surfacing from the more recent numbness. She had failed Ferelden, and her lord, and now-
She focused on the idea of redemption. She was a Grey Warden, and she could do little else than fight.
--
He watched.
As acting commander, he couldn't spend as much time as he wanted with her- or with any of the rest. Sigrun banged on his door and he sent her away with apologies. She nicked his knives for the trouble, then left an apple with an arrow through it on his desk along with a book. He hadn't had time to read it, but he took the time to eat the fruit.
But he did watch Cauthrien, when he could. At meals, in the yard, he watched as she took her recovery into her own hands. He'd put a sword in her hand and showed her that she still remembered how to wield it. She could go from there.
Warden Cauthrien. Sister. He hadn't ever imagined he would call her that, or have an occasion to call her anything. He had his brief memories, his stories, and the stories of Kallian. In Kallian's stories, Cauthrien loomed as terrifying figure, the woman who had beaten her and the king down and dragged them off to Fort Drakon - and she was a tragic figure, stepping aside at the Landsmeet doors.
Rumors from the war painted her in brighter strokes: strict and harsh and cracking beneath the pressure of Loghain's rule. And then, imprisoned and forgotten, a relic of a war already won, an enemy with no teeth or claws to threaten.
And he saw it come back in pieces. The set of her shoulders, the expression she wore when she spoke to Sigrun or the other Wardens, the way she could shout an order in the yard and have even Orlesians following it.
But she still came to breakfast late and almost bewildered every morning, or every other morning, and that was why he kept watching. He worried.
--
When Nathaniel Howe, Commander of the Grey of Ferelden came to meals with them all, he always sat near her.
She tried not to read too much into it. He had given her the Joining, and he had dragged her from her room the next morning. Beyond that, they interacted little. But his words clung to her: Then we start there. He had worked her until the day was nearly gone despite how her broken body ached at it. They had started there.
And she was getting- somewhere.
That somewhere ached and stung and howled when she saw him too early in the morning, before dreams had entirely faded. The hook of his nose undid whatever kindnesses he paid her in those hazy hours. Counting stones remained unavoidable as the days wore on. His father's actions had put her in Drakon, actions she could have stopped, and the planes of his face, the timbre of his voice, reminded her at every step.
She tried not to think about it.
Luckily, he often took his breakfast in his office. When he sat beside her at dinner, it was with a polite nod and a slight smile. That night was no different, and when their wordless, meaningless greeting had been exchanged, she turned back to finishing off the rabbit stew laid out before her.
"How is your training?" Nathaniel asked, and she looked up, startled. He almost never spoke to her. And when he did- Rendon's voice echoed.
She hid it beneath the lingering numbness of Drakon. "Well enough."
"... I sent a query to Denerim asking after your sword," he said, gaze sliding over hers and coming to rest on the squares of honeycomb, taken from wintering hives, set out in small dishes along the table.
She stared at it in turn, working up the courage for a simple breath of, "And?"
"I'm sorry."
Cauthrien swallowed, then closed her eyes, bowing her head. "To be expected."
"Somebody sold it to a collector. The king wasn't aware of this until he passed the sentence, else he would have sent it with you. I'm sorry."
It was gone. Her chest tightened and she pushed aside the stew. The Summer Sword, her last piece of Loghain from when he was good and bright and strong, sold. Of course it was sold. So little remained of what came before, except the gnawing guilt, and-
She pushed away from the table. "It's to be expected," she repeated, and left the room, counting paces until she could find a spot to sit and count stones.
--
They were sitting in the armory; he pulled on leather straps and replaced those that were too weakened to trust, and she mended mail. Nearly three weeks gone by since she had arrived, and from the looks of it, her fingers were regaining their old dexterity, their old callouses. Nearly three weeks gone by, and she was still closed off.
He wasn't doing a very good job of being Commander of the Grey, by the standard Kallian Tabris had set. No wonder that Weisshaupt was sending a replacement.
But Cauthrien was alive and he could do a better job than he'd been doing this last month. He had asked her to help him inventory their spare armor. It would be easier, in private. And it was a conversation to be had alone. He remembered the frozen pain on her face when he'd given her news he likely should never have spoken of. He had made a mistake.
He would fix it.
He cleared his throat. "So, tell me."
"Tell you what, Howe?" She didn't glance up from her work, though the muscles in her jaw clenched a moment, her heel shifted against the ground to brace her better, as if preparing for an attack. They had barely spoken beyond orders and requests since the day after her Joining, but he had learned the little signs of her irritation, of her attention, of her distance. She was present. And she was displeased.
Well, so was he. He scowled. "Cauthrien," he warned, then shook his head. No, now was no time to bristle at his family's name, or the way she said it. She was loyal and good; her prejudices did not color her work. But her past did. "Tell me about Ostagar. About the war. About your time in Fort Drakon."
"Why?" Her gruffness surprised him. She had been distant, yes, but she had never been- whatever this was. Nathaniel set down his work and, in place of pinching the bridge of his nose, set his hands behind him to take his weight.
He had decided to do this, and so he would. "If the Warden taught me one thing - it's the importance of having somebody who will listen. So if you want to talk about Loghain-"
"You talked to her about Rendon?"
"I-" It was a barb, a taunt, he was sure of it. He nearly rose to his feet and left the room. But instead he sighed and gave in to the urge to rub at the tension building between his brows. "... I almost killed her for it. But yes, eventually."
"Then you know about what he did. And you know about the war." There was a flicker of anger across her face, and then she yanked hard with the pliers she held and the link she worked at snapped. She bit back a curse.
"Is it so bad?" he asked, rolling forward into a crouch.
"I did a lot of things I regret. Can we move on?"
"Can you?"
She looked up and met his eyes, lips parted for another defensive retort. None came.
He leaned forward across the space separating them and took the mail from her. She did not clutch it. She yielded, and he sighed. "I live in the shadow of the deeds of my father. You live in the shadow of the deeds of Loghain. It is comparable enough, and I have moved on. So will you."
She turned from him then, brow furrowed and jaw tense, and said only,
"As you say."
--
"Aim for the target, Cauthrien," Nathaniel barked, and Cauthrien flinched, loosing her arrow too early. It went wide from the straw darkspawn, and she all but threw her bow to the ground.
"You handle arrows, Howe," she said, and he was over to her in an instant, wrenching the bow from her grip. She stood proud and unflinching, jaw clenched. It had been like this, ever since that evening in the armory. Move on taunted her, as did him, his nose, the constant reminder of the now ever-present thought of her failure. It returned with greater fervor each day, with the weight of a weapon in her hand.
He had made her a Warden and given her a job and brought her back to life. It would destroy her.
He didn't step away once he had the bow out of her hands and unstrung. He stayed in her space and she glared in return.
"I will, and you will sit in this Keep and stay off the field because you refuse to do your job," he growled.
Her upper lip curled.
A month ago, he had been there to pull her from her room, had showed her she could still hold a sword. He had given her a life, and to have a life - to be Cauthrien again - meant she had to remember what had gone before. She had to see it all erased or twisted, a bow in her hands and a different cause at her back. And he had been the one to lift the chalice to her lips and breathe life back into her.
Maker damn him.
And Nathaniel moved even closer, lips pressed to a thin line as he met her gaze, her squared shoulders, her lifted chin.
"Or," he continued at a growl, "you will stop this madness, comport yourself like a soldier, and learn how to use a bow for more than cloud shooting. Do you understand? And you will call me commander or Nathaniel or brother. I am not a Howe any longer. Just as you are not a Fereldan knight."
She snarled, lashing out and striking him across the cheek. She was barehanded save for the leather glove on her right hand, and so it did not break skin as it would have in armor. But it knocked him away and made his face contort in turn.
"I serve Ferelden," she growled, just as he surged forward, casting the bow aside and grabbing for her wrist, her shoulder. He tried to catch her and still her; she brought her knee up, aiming for soft flesh or weak joint, but he caught her leg. She tried to break the hold, but he spun and pulled her down, and she cried out as she hit the cold, muddy earth.
Cauthrien caught his hair and he caught her waist and she clawed at him, struck at him, and he returned in each in kind. Once, he nearly pinned her, dragging her back against him, and he hissed in her ear, "You are a Warden," but then she elbowed him in the kidneys and broke away as he coughed and sputtered. Her fury clouded her thoughts and sharpened her vision, strengthened her hands and quickened her limbs, and she fell upon him. He shoved a boot into her stomach. She caught his arm and wrenched.
They were a tangle on the ground, all mud and sweat and anger. His knuckles caught her cheek, she nearly broke his ribs, and when she laughed it was broken and low and he got an arm around her throat and shoved his knee against the small of her back and pushed, pushed her into the mud until she shot an arm back and caught him in the jaw with her elbow. He fell back and she scrambled halfway to her feet.
She stared at him.
He stared back.
He was bleeding from a split lip, his face growing swollen, and her muscles trembled and her bones ached. Too tired to stay up, she sank back down and waited for the next assault.
It didn't come.
--
"Careful," she said as she wiped the grime and dried blood from his mouth. He glowered, then gave up and just leaned against the wall at his back, looking up at the greying sky. It would be Summerday soon, and this miserable weather would finally break. There would be warmth and some measure of dry, and he would stop daydreaming of years spent in Antiva and the northern reaches of the Marches and wish instead for the days of his childhood.
It was easier to think about that then the rest of it, Cauthrien just as bruised and dirty as he was, the victor tending to the wounds of the fallen. Some commander, he thought, and choked down a painful, dry laugh.
"I said careful," Cauthrien muttered, and moved to clean the cut on his forehead.
"And were you careful when you struck me?"
"And were you careful when you insulted me?" She kept his gaze now, exhausted though she was. Her hands trembled against him, and when she sat back it was with a heaviness he knew from after hard battles and long practices.
"It needed to be said." Nathaniel shrugged, then winced. She hit hard; her recovery, then, was certainly going well. He had only meant to stop the fight before it moved any further, but she had evaded and brought him down.
And now she was peering at him, fingers twisted in the cloth she held. "You truly believe you're not a Howe anymore?"
He shoved a mass of mud-clodded hair out of his face. "I try to. It does not always hold true, but I try. It is what we do. We give up family and home for a new purpose. You knew that when you took the Joining. You could have chosen death."
"I could have." She scrubbed at the dirt caking her knees and hands, picking at it with her fingers. "Maybe I should have."
"But you didn't," he reminded her, and he reached out to take her elbow. "Remember that. You made your decision. Did you never regret joining the army?"
She looked down to his hand, then let him guide her with just a lack of pressure to the wall beside him. She settled against it, drawing her legs up to her chest. They both looked out to the yard, the ground torn up and scarred from where they had been. The bow had been put away, clean cloth and water retrieved, but nothing else had changed.
Except that she was listening.
"At first, yes," she said at last. "Not because it wasn't what I thought it would be like - but because it was everything I thought it would be like. And I had to leave home for it all. I left home to be humiliated, hurt, pushed to my limits, and then rebuilt a different person."
"You were young, weren't you?" At her questioning frown, he shrugged the less painful shoulder. "They tell stories of you."
"Of course they do," she sighed, and looked up to the sky. He followed her gaze though he had already marked the weather a hundred times over. More rain. They sat in silence until he thought she had forgotten his question, or had decided to never answer. And then she exhaled, long and winding, and her lips twitched into a faint smile. "I was fifteen. Not young, but young enough. I would have been betrothed in another year."
He almost asked did you know to whom, but he stopped short. He focused on his task. It was hard with his ears still ringing and his jaw aching, but he was trying to set her straight again. He was trying to fix her, like Kallian had done to everybody she ever came across.
"Then this is the same," he said. "You would have been dead in another year. Instead you're here. And you will be rebuilt again."
His hand was still on her arm, and he frowned at it, then let her go.
"And you?" she asked, pulling his eyes back up. She was dirt-stained and tired and still too-thin, but her eyes were bright and focused. She was more there than she had been since she arrived.
She was the woman he remembered and expected.
"Me?"
"Living in your father's shadow. Your father-"
"Did horrible things, I am aware," he said with a wave of his hand and a clenched jaw. "I have moved on as best I can."
"Your father made my life a living nightmare for almost a year," she said. "He brought this country down around me. He took the last shreds of sanity Loghain had left, and he unravelled all of them. His personal proclivities were the least of it, Nathaniel." He flinched, but she continued on without pause, "And I know all of that. If we speak of moving on, then can you move on, knowing that I know that, and will never forget it, or forgive it of him?"
Her eyes were wide and a deep grey, and she seemed too innocent to be asking that of him, to be dredging up old insecurities and pain. She opened old scars, and his shoulders hunched. He folded in on himself. But he did not look away.
"I will have to," he said.
She nodded. It was a slow, thoughtful thing, and he relaxed just a little at the thought that he was getting through. His soul ached with old injuries, but if the baring of them soothed hers-
"You are not your father," she said, and reached out to touch his shoulder.
"And you only did what you thought was best," he responded, though his voice wavered at first. Not your father, from a woman who had truly known him-
He had thought he was beyond those fears, but the reassurance soothed something deep and festering. It didn't go away; the flame of it did not burn away the dark. But it was something.
"I tried," she agreed, voice dropping to a whisper as she looked away.
"What happened?" If he shifted closer to her it was because the yard was growing frigid as the sun went down. But it was also because she was his focus, his goal, and he was finally seeing the woman he had heard stories of and looked on with admiration and almost adoration as a boy.
Her lips, thin and warped by pain and age, quirked. "A lot of things," she murmured.
He leaned forward just enough to catch her gaze again. It made his back scream and his stomach ache, but he wanted to see her. He wanted her to look on him.
"I mean in the in-between. Fort Drakon until now."
She laughed, and it was dry and cracked and ended in a cough. But she uncurled where she sat and leaned languid against the stone behind them.
"I was gone," Cauthrien said. "Ten months in a room with no passage of time, and not enough room to move, and all I could do was count stones and forget myself. You and your blasted duty brought me back. With everything that includes."
"And what will you do with that?"
She shrugged and smiled, thin and faint but undeniably there. "Continue to serve, I suppose. Continue moving."
That was the moment where the sun should have broken through the cloud cover, blinding red in the sunset, but it was spring in Amaranthine. The clouds remained unbroken, and the ground remained wet and cold. He smiled all the same.
"Good," he said, and then stood despite the twinges and aches and pains. He held out a hand.
She took it.