[fic] ferro comitante [6/?]
Title: Ferro Comitante 6/?
Words: 3255
Rating: Teen
Summary: There's a lot of things wrong in the land of Ferelden -- little, little things. When Alistair discovers why, he will not be alone in his choice between the reality that is and the reality that ought to be. In this chapter: Alistair, newly a Templar and newly exiled from them, finds his way back to apostate Jacinta Surana and convinces her that it's a good idea for them to travel together. Leliana approves +10.
ferro comitante
my sword as my companion
6.
He came upon them in the evening, two figures setting up a rough camp, one hooded, the other's red hair like a burning brand through the trees. Before he could even say anything, the smaller of the two figures whirled and pointed her staff, and Alistair felt cold flung over him as abruptly as a blanket over his head. He was barely able to dodge one of the Bard's arrows before managing to lift benumbed fingers to his helm and toss the visor up. “It's me!” he croaked, with a mental push dispelling the frost that rimed his plate armor.
The mage lowered her staff and blinked. “The Templar - oh, I'm sorry,” Jacinta said, planting her staff in the dirt as Alistair removed his helm and ruefully pushed his hair back. How refreshingly cool the night breeze felt after a day and a half's walk, during which he hadn't dared take his tin bucket off. “It's true, then? They've expelled you?”
“Yes.” Alistair thrust his helm into his overstuffed knapsack by main force as Leliana came forward, bright-eyed with apology. “Maker, you two don't mess around, do you?”
“We've already had a close call today,” Leliana explained, giving him a pat on the shoulder plate as she passed by to retrieve her arrow from a nearby tree. She frowned at it with almost comical dismay. “I should not have missed. That close? With you on cold? Honestly. All that time on the lute has made me rusty.”
“Well, I'm grateful that you did,” Alistair assured her, and brushed ice shards off his arm, dropping his pack at his feet.
“So, then,” Jacinta said loudly, refocusing Alistair's attention. There was absolutely no reason why the slight mage's searching look should have made him quail, but he nonetheless stood up straighter, clearing his throat. “If we're all to be traveling together, we should make clear what our purposes are and where we're going. If you think about it, we present twice as big a target for those who would hunt us, now - two fugitives for the price of one, if they catch us.”
“That's a big 'if,'” Leliana sang from by the fire, where she had returned to watch over a pot of stew emitting some delicious juicy scent that made Alistair's nose twitch plaintively.
“The Templars are going to have a hell of a time finding you.” Alistair inhaled, surreptitiously, he hoped. “What you did - destroying the phylactery like that? I mean, it rather cements you in their head as a perilous sort of apostate - you know, the kind who thinks - ”
Jacinta snorted at that as if at some private joke. Alistair hoped the joke wasn't him, and continued, “But it does help you. Without it, they've got to find you the old-fashioned way. And I can... well, Templars know when mages are near because the lyrium we take sensitizes us to your mana, right? So if we're in danger of being caught, I can neutralize yours. Put my helm on, throw you over my shoulder, tell the boys I've got the apostate well in hand, carry on. No harm done.”
Jacinta contemplated the prospect, a vague queasiness settling over her features that rather took the sting out of that earlier sternness. “If... you must,” she allowed. “But truly - I don't understand... and I have to understand. I can't just trust you, even if I would like to.” Her hands twisted around each other, around the staff, worrying a ring on one of her fingers. “I understand the Templars have expelled you, but that doesn't mean you are obliged to help me. How can I be sure this isn't all a ruse?”
“Aside from the fact that such a ruse would put me at levels of sneaky I'm wholly incapable of?” Alistair shook his head. “I sympathize with your position, for all that you stabbed me-”
“You sliced my leg open! I had to limp on that all the way to Lothering!”
“I'm just saying.” Alistair held out his hands, warily, to pacify Jacinta's indignant glare. If they'd been told once at the Chantry, they'd been told a thousand times: don't agitate the mages. “We both have reasons to distrust each other. I'm still not completely confident you won't decide I'm easier to deal with as a frog and throw me into that absurdly aromatic stew.”
“Thank you!” called Leliana.
“I couldn't even if I wanted to.” The subtle twitch of Jacinta's brows upwards made it clear the mage had by no means decided whether or not she wanted to. “I'm not that kind of mage.”
“Yes, and that's another thing. You're, I'm sorry, a distraction. That friend of yours you mentioned? Jowan?”
“Yes...”
“That's who they'll be after.” On that point, Alistair had little doubt. “Confirmed blood mage, no phylactery? You're dangerous by association, sure, but they'll empty the local garrisons to go after him.”
“Oh.”
There was a rather heavy pause.
“That was supposed to cheer you up, a little bit,” said Alistair, chagrined. Jacinta nodded, looking down to fumble with the clasp at her neck, shadows like spider-legs down her cheeks.
“The stew is ready! That will cheer us all up, I think.” Leliana waved them over. “Come sit by the fire, you two.”
A few bowls of the stuff were passed round. It was by far a better concoction than any of Alistair's efforts (nothing charred floated to the top and nothing that still had a face poked out from between the bubbles). After a hearty slurp, Alistair glanced over at the Orlesian. “And what's your part in all this, Bard?”
Leliana shrugged. “I saw Jacinta at the general store on my way to the tavern, trying to bargain with that horrible little storekeep. I stepped in and,” she smiled, “encouraged him to give her a fairer price.”
“I thought I'd really bargained him down,” Jacinta admitted. “Leliana told me later he was still fleecing me. There's no lyrium potion in Thedas that ought to cost three gold, but I didn't know that. We don't really have economics classes in the Circle Tower. Why would mages need to know all that, right? It's not like we're ever going to leave.”
“I had been in Lothering for about a week at that point.” Leliana lifted the bowl to her lips and tilted it delicately back, then wiped her mouth neatly with a clean little cloth she might as well have magicked out of her breastplate. “It is charming in its own quaint, provincial way, but let us be honest, there is not much there, no? I knew that a mage in Lothering, let alone an elf mage in Circle robes, would have a story worth hearing.”
“I hadn't healed up yet, at that point. I covered the top of my staff with my hands,” Jacinta passed a hand over the obviously magical orb nestled between the twining tips of her staff, “and pretended I was just some elf who'd run into trouble with bandits on the road.”
“But I can tell when someone is hobbling on their last leg! So to speak.” Leliana grinned, and Jacinta cracked a tiny smile as she stirred her stew. “I took her aside and helped her to my room above the tavern to bandage her up. Imagine my surprise when she stopped me with a hand, drank one of the phials we'd just pried from that little man, and closed that wound up herself with scarce more than a thought.”
“It takes a little more than a thought, Leliana.” Jacinta tugged her hood down, as though doing so might hide her growing smile.
“And then she explained what had happened, and I gave her my cloak and told her I would at least help her as far as the next town, if she wished it.”
“My blubbering must have been fairly pitiful.”
“Fairly.” Leliana smiled at the elf across from her, who raised her bowl to the Bard with both hands in a toast. “It was the least I could do in exchange for such trust, and such a tale.”
“What,” interrupted Alistair, “you didn't get the interrogation? No fair.”
Leliana tilted her head to the side, in consideration. “Well, no...”
“It's different,” Jacinta said. She scraped her spoon around her bowl without looking at anyone. “Alistair - you're a Templar. You and all your order are charged to hunt me and all my kind down. That's why you exist. Leliana is... um, Orlesian.”
“They did invade us, not all too long ago,” Alistair pointed out.
“We left,” Leliana offered.
“What does any of that matter to me?” Jacinta put her empty bowl down on the earth in front of her and gave Alistair one of her piercing looks, like a pale green gimlet aimed true, right through him. “My mother was Dalish. I was seven years old when the Templars killed her, pried me from her corpse, and brought me to the Tower. Honestly, say what you will about Jowan - and I have a lot to say about him myself, and I wish he was in front of me so I could tell him, every single word of it - but he was my only friend for a very long time, until they made Wynne my mentor, and even then...”
She swallowed hard, and fixed her gaze to the earth, and the next few words came flat and staccato, like so many stones thrown against the dirt. “I was unprepared to leave, especially the way I did. I cried my hour, and then I was done, but I'm not looking back anymore. I want to go home.”
“To the Dalish?”
“Yes. That was the other reason I wanted to know where you were going,” Jacinta said, her glance at Alistair catching him mid-slurp. She blinked, and he blinked, and the smile winked over her face again, there and gone. “I... if you're willing to help me, I'm willing to help you, so long as our paths align. I'm going to the Brecilian Forest. Where are you headed?”
“I don't really know.” Alistair rotated the simple earthen bowl between his gloves. “I mean, Leliana had a pretty good idea, but...”
Jacinta stared quizzically between the two of them. “When did you two talk?”
“In Lothering. A Bard is always well apprised of the news, wheresoever she may wander.” Leliana shrugged. “As it happens, Alistair is as much a news item as you are, my dear.”
“It sounds really stupid,” Alistair muttered, “when you say it like that.”
“Can't be more stupid than 'my best friend was a blood mage and I never figured it out till he opened a vein and knocked down a room full of Templars.” Jacinta regarded Alistair with glimmering wryness.
“How about, the Revered Mother set me up like I was the punchline to her sodding joke?” Alistair shook his head. “I can't even talk about it without feeling like a dupe, or... I mean, I just - wonder what the hell I ever did to her, aside from... aren't all kids brats? Was I that bad?”
“She has been suborned,” Leliana said softly. “I would not believe it was you personally, Alistair. I think she would have done it to anyone in your position.”
“That's not exactly a comfort either, you know. The Chantry has its hand in everything. If it's a part of what's going on in the capital, I don't know how the hell I'm supposed to figure that mess all out.”
“What's going on in the capital?” Jacinta asked, her brow furrowed.
“King's dead, the Prince has disappeared, the Hero of the River Dane just declared himself Regent for Queen Anora, and I apparently abrogated my duty to hunt mages because I didn't find you fast enough, never mind that I was sent to do so by myself and I've never exactly done this before and oh, by the way, I didn't have a bloody phylactery so I had to rely on my own stunning sense of woodcraft.” Alistair took a breath and scuffed his boot in the dirt, watching as bits of grass and rock flew into the fire and sent it spinning high for just a moment, like a baby dragon's hiccup. “But as Leliana points out, it's probably all part and parcel. I'm, ah...”
The silence stretched on. Night creatures chirruped and chattered. Leliana's bright blue gaze rested on Alistair, profound with compassion. Though Jacinta watched the fire, her huddled posture was attentive, and as the quiet lengthened, she turned her head curiously, those unsettling eyes on Alistair again. With the movement, her hair slipped out of her hood's confines like a pale golden snake uncoiling down her shoulder.
“You know how you're afraid I'm lying, and I'm going to betray you to the Chantry the first second I get?” Alistair finally said.
Jacinta didn't even try to deny it. She nodded, tucking her ragged hair neatly back inside her hood.
“I'm King Maric's son,” said Alistair, and Maker, how he hated the sound of it, how he hated his own voice and the abashed little laugh it added onto the end of that sentence, as if the sentence on its own weren't joke enough. “So if Teyrn Loghain or whoever is going after the Theirin bloodline, they've got to get me out of the way, too.”
Quite abruptly, he was no longer in the mood to talk about who he was or where he wanted to go, not least because he had no clue anymore. Templars were Chantry sons, so what did that make him? Disowned? Unwanted? Again? He yanked his pack over by its strings and shook off one glove so that he could dig around for his standard-issue bedroll.
There was a long, reeling pause before the mage spoke. “But,” said Jacinta, as though she were only now stating aloud some pack train of thought already far down the road, “but if you're the king's son, why are you a Templar?”
“Because he got me on a serving girl,” Alistair replied shortly. “He probably never knew I existed. I suppose they kept me around as a spare, figured to raise me up righteous, just in case. Must be why they fed me to the Chantry, since it sure wasn't because I wanted to go.” He tugged his bedroll free from the knapsack, tumbling half a dozen myriad personal accessories out along with it. Restraining himself from sighing hard enough to put the campfire out, he knelt to arrange his meager belongings. “Anyway, now you've got something on me, too. If you want me out of the way, get word to a Templar who I am and it's all done.”
“I wouldn't tell a Templar the way to the privy if they were about to explode.” Contrary to every expectation Alistair had of the mage girl, she was smiling again, that small crooked thing she hid away in shadow. “Jowan and I used to corner the new ones and give them all kinds of wrong directions, just so we could watch them try not to do the pee dance while standing guard over some dim-witted apprentice who couldn't direct a line between two points.”
That surprised a laugh out of Alistair, though it was odd thinking of a maleficar and an apostate sharing giggles over some childish prank. He supposed they were people, just children, before they were either of those, even if they were mages the whole time. Then he realized the division in thought he'd just made between people and mages, and ducked his head, grateful he hadn't spoken it aloud.
“I told him what happened in the capital, and then, when he told me his name, that the Chantry was searching for him,” Leliana said softly over Alistair's bowed head. “I was sorry to be the bearer of such bad news. But a Templar named Alistair? They always said of Maric that he was a golden king, so once I saw him, I felt certain.”
“I protest!” Alistair flushed, sweeping tiny statuettes back into his knapsack. He removed his other glove and stowed it away, then made a show of smoothing his bedroll. “There's other blonds in Ferelden.”
“Ah, but I doubt there's another blond Alistair in the whole Fereldan Order. It's not exactly a common name. Anyway,” said Leliana lightly, “your face when I asked you if you were the king's son was as clear and loud a 'yes' as I've ever seen.”
“It's been very hush-hush all my life. It's not really something I expect strangers to waltz up and ask me,” Alistair muttered.
Jacinta eyed him with cautious interest. “So it's Denerim for you, then?”
“I don't know.” Alistair began the lengthy process of unbuckling his cuirass, grateful for the mail shirt and smallclothes beneath. “Maybe. It's as good a place to go as any. I don't know what I'd even do there, other than walk into a Templar and blow the whole thing.”
“Maybe... maybe the Dalish would let you stay with them, for a little while, to give you time to think. You'd be safe there,” Jacinta said.
Alistair shrugged, the gesture serving both to get the bulk of the heavy Templar armor off him and to indicate his response. “I'll go with you as far as that if you like. At least if the Dalish shoot me on sight, I won't have to worry about that whole mess in the capital, right?”
“Let us hope we can pursue a more diplomatic course,” Leliana yawned. Her voice seemed to come from someplace different. When Alistair looked up, she had already ensconced herself in her bedroll, nothing but a thatch of scarlet hair spilling free.
Jacinta still sat by the fire, her face abstracted. Alistair shed the remainder of his armor and slid into his bedroll, not far from her. The lyrium sense within him glowed warm like the mud idol strung round his neck, a secret within his skin and without.
She felt so absurdly familiar. He hadn't had a spot of trouble locating her. Was it like this with all Templars, all mages? “When you're ready to sleep,” he told her softly, “wake me up and I'll take next watch.”
“Oh,” she murmured. “Yes. I hadn't even thought of that.”
He raised his gaze to hers, and it wandered to the tattoo on her face, black beneath her eye, a bold and sinuous line above, echoing the curve of her brow. The Circle did not stamp its mages so. “Fugitives on the run now, remember?”
“How could I forget?” she said bleakly. Alistair's answering smile was crimped with sympathy, and after a moment, she nodded and turned her face away again, the orb of her staff refracting firelight across the clearing's floor.
Exclusively on SiB@LJ: Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5
On Archive of Our Own: Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5
On Fanfiction.Net: Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5
Words: 3255
Rating: Teen
Summary: There's a lot of things wrong in the land of Ferelden -- little, little things. When Alistair discovers why, he will not be alone in his choice between the reality that is and the reality that ought to be. In this chapter: Alistair, newly a Templar and newly exiled from them, finds his way back to apostate Jacinta Surana and convinces her that it's a good idea for them to travel together. Leliana approves +10.
ferro comitante
my sword as my companion
6.
He came upon them in the evening, two figures setting up a rough camp, one hooded, the other's red hair like a burning brand through the trees. Before he could even say anything, the smaller of the two figures whirled and pointed her staff, and Alistair felt cold flung over him as abruptly as a blanket over his head. He was barely able to dodge one of the Bard's arrows before managing to lift benumbed fingers to his helm and toss the visor up. “It's me!” he croaked, with a mental push dispelling the frost that rimed his plate armor.
The mage lowered her staff and blinked. “The Templar - oh, I'm sorry,” Jacinta said, planting her staff in the dirt as Alistair removed his helm and ruefully pushed his hair back. How refreshingly cool the night breeze felt after a day and a half's walk, during which he hadn't dared take his tin bucket off. “It's true, then? They've expelled you?”
“Yes.” Alistair thrust his helm into his overstuffed knapsack by main force as Leliana came forward, bright-eyed with apology. “Maker, you two don't mess around, do you?”
“We've already had a close call today,” Leliana explained, giving him a pat on the shoulder plate as she passed by to retrieve her arrow from a nearby tree. She frowned at it with almost comical dismay. “I should not have missed. That close? With you on cold? Honestly. All that time on the lute has made me rusty.”
“Well, I'm grateful that you did,” Alistair assured her, and brushed ice shards off his arm, dropping his pack at his feet.
“So, then,” Jacinta said loudly, refocusing Alistair's attention. There was absolutely no reason why the slight mage's searching look should have made him quail, but he nonetheless stood up straighter, clearing his throat. “If we're all to be traveling together, we should make clear what our purposes are and where we're going. If you think about it, we present twice as big a target for those who would hunt us, now - two fugitives for the price of one, if they catch us.”
“That's a big 'if,'” Leliana sang from by the fire, where she had returned to watch over a pot of stew emitting some delicious juicy scent that made Alistair's nose twitch plaintively.
“The Templars are going to have a hell of a time finding you.” Alistair inhaled, surreptitiously, he hoped. “What you did - destroying the phylactery like that? I mean, it rather cements you in their head as a perilous sort of apostate - you know, the kind who thinks - ”
Jacinta snorted at that as if at some private joke. Alistair hoped the joke wasn't him, and continued, “But it does help you. Without it, they've got to find you the old-fashioned way. And I can... well, Templars know when mages are near because the lyrium we take sensitizes us to your mana, right? So if we're in danger of being caught, I can neutralize yours. Put my helm on, throw you over my shoulder, tell the boys I've got the apostate well in hand, carry on. No harm done.”
Jacinta contemplated the prospect, a vague queasiness settling over her features that rather took the sting out of that earlier sternness. “If... you must,” she allowed. “But truly - I don't understand... and I have to understand. I can't just trust you, even if I would like to.” Her hands twisted around each other, around the staff, worrying a ring on one of her fingers. “I understand the Templars have expelled you, but that doesn't mean you are obliged to help me. How can I be sure this isn't all a ruse?”
“Aside from the fact that such a ruse would put me at levels of sneaky I'm wholly incapable of?” Alistair shook his head. “I sympathize with your position, for all that you stabbed me-”
“You sliced my leg open! I had to limp on that all the way to Lothering!”
“I'm just saying.” Alistair held out his hands, warily, to pacify Jacinta's indignant glare. If they'd been told once at the Chantry, they'd been told a thousand times: don't agitate the mages. “We both have reasons to distrust each other. I'm still not completely confident you won't decide I'm easier to deal with as a frog and throw me into that absurdly aromatic stew.”
“Thank you!” called Leliana.
“I couldn't even if I wanted to.” The subtle twitch of Jacinta's brows upwards made it clear the mage had by no means decided whether or not she wanted to. “I'm not that kind of mage.”
“Yes, and that's another thing. You're, I'm sorry, a distraction. That friend of yours you mentioned? Jowan?”
“Yes...”
“That's who they'll be after.” On that point, Alistair had little doubt. “Confirmed blood mage, no phylactery? You're dangerous by association, sure, but they'll empty the local garrisons to go after him.”
“Oh.”
There was a rather heavy pause.
“That was supposed to cheer you up, a little bit,” said Alistair, chagrined. Jacinta nodded, looking down to fumble with the clasp at her neck, shadows like spider-legs down her cheeks.
“The stew is ready! That will cheer us all up, I think.” Leliana waved them over. “Come sit by the fire, you two.”
A few bowls of the stuff were passed round. It was by far a better concoction than any of Alistair's efforts (nothing charred floated to the top and nothing that still had a face poked out from between the bubbles). After a hearty slurp, Alistair glanced over at the Orlesian. “And what's your part in all this, Bard?”
Leliana shrugged. “I saw Jacinta at the general store on my way to the tavern, trying to bargain with that horrible little storekeep. I stepped in and,” she smiled, “encouraged him to give her a fairer price.”
“I thought I'd really bargained him down,” Jacinta admitted. “Leliana told me later he was still fleecing me. There's no lyrium potion in Thedas that ought to cost three gold, but I didn't know that. We don't really have economics classes in the Circle Tower. Why would mages need to know all that, right? It's not like we're ever going to leave.”
“I had been in Lothering for about a week at that point.” Leliana lifted the bowl to her lips and tilted it delicately back, then wiped her mouth neatly with a clean little cloth she might as well have magicked out of her breastplate. “It is charming in its own quaint, provincial way, but let us be honest, there is not much there, no? I knew that a mage in Lothering, let alone an elf mage in Circle robes, would have a story worth hearing.”
“I hadn't healed up yet, at that point. I covered the top of my staff with my hands,” Jacinta passed a hand over the obviously magical orb nestled between the twining tips of her staff, “and pretended I was just some elf who'd run into trouble with bandits on the road.”
“But I can tell when someone is hobbling on their last leg! So to speak.” Leliana grinned, and Jacinta cracked a tiny smile as she stirred her stew. “I took her aside and helped her to my room above the tavern to bandage her up. Imagine my surprise when she stopped me with a hand, drank one of the phials we'd just pried from that little man, and closed that wound up herself with scarce more than a thought.”
“It takes a little more than a thought, Leliana.” Jacinta tugged her hood down, as though doing so might hide her growing smile.
“And then she explained what had happened, and I gave her my cloak and told her I would at least help her as far as the next town, if she wished it.”
“My blubbering must have been fairly pitiful.”
“Fairly.” Leliana smiled at the elf across from her, who raised her bowl to the Bard with both hands in a toast. “It was the least I could do in exchange for such trust, and such a tale.”
“What,” interrupted Alistair, “you didn't get the interrogation? No fair.”
Leliana tilted her head to the side, in consideration. “Well, no...”
“It's different,” Jacinta said. She scraped her spoon around her bowl without looking at anyone. “Alistair - you're a Templar. You and all your order are charged to hunt me and all my kind down. That's why you exist. Leliana is... um, Orlesian.”
“They did invade us, not all too long ago,” Alistair pointed out.
“We left,” Leliana offered.
“What does any of that matter to me?” Jacinta put her empty bowl down on the earth in front of her and gave Alistair one of her piercing looks, like a pale green gimlet aimed true, right through him. “My mother was Dalish. I was seven years old when the Templars killed her, pried me from her corpse, and brought me to the Tower. Honestly, say what you will about Jowan - and I have a lot to say about him myself, and I wish he was in front of me so I could tell him, every single word of it - but he was my only friend for a very long time, until they made Wynne my mentor, and even then...”
She swallowed hard, and fixed her gaze to the earth, and the next few words came flat and staccato, like so many stones thrown against the dirt. “I was unprepared to leave, especially the way I did. I cried my hour, and then I was done, but I'm not looking back anymore. I want to go home.”
“To the Dalish?”
“Yes. That was the other reason I wanted to know where you were going,” Jacinta said, her glance at Alistair catching him mid-slurp. She blinked, and he blinked, and the smile winked over her face again, there and gone. “I... if you're willing to help me, I'm willing to help you, so long as our paths align. I'm going to the Brecilian Forest. Where are you headed?”
“I don't really know.” Alistair rotated the simple earthen bowl between his gloves. “I mean, Leliana had a pretty good idea, but...”
Jacinta stared quizzically between the two of them. “When did you two talk?”
“In Lothering. A Bard is always well apprised of the news, wheresoever she may wander.” Leliana shrugged. “As it happens, Alistair is as much a news item as you are, my dear.”
“It sounds really stupid,” Alistair muttered, “when you say it like that.”
“Can't be more stupid than 'my best friend was a blood mage and I never figured it out till he opened a vein and knocked down a room full of Templars.” Jacinta regarded Alistair with glimmering wryness.
“How about, the Revered Mother set me up like I was the punchline to her sodding joke?” Alistair shook his head. “I can't even talk about it without feeling like a dupe, or... I mean, I just - wonder what the hell I ever did to her, aside from... aren't all kids brats? Was I that bad?”
“She has been suborned,” Leliana said softly. “I would not believe it was you personally, Alistair. I think she would have done it to anyone in your position.”
“That's not exactly a comfort either, you know. The Chantry has its hand in everything. If it's a part of what's going on in the capital, I don't know how the hell I'm supposed to figure that mess all out.”
“What's going on in the capital?” Jacinta asked, her brow furrowed.
“King's dead, the Prince has disappeared, the Hero of the River Dane just declared himself Regent for Queen Anora, and I apparently abrogated my duty to hunt mages because I didn't find you fast enough, never mind that I was sent to do so by myself and I've never exactly done this before and oh, by the way, I didn't have a bloody phylactery so I had to rely on my own stunning sense of woodcraft.” Alistair took a breath and scuffed his boot in the dirt, watching as bits of grass and rock flew into the fire and sent it spinning high for just a moment, like a baby dragon's hiccup. “But as Leliana points out, it's probably all part and parcel. I'm, ah...”
The silence stretched on. Night creatures chirruped and chattered. Leliana's bright blue gaze rested on Alistair, profound with compassion. Though Jacinta watched the fire, her huddled posture was attentive, and as the quiet lengthened, she turned her head curiously, those unsettling eyes on Alistair again. With the movement, her hair slipped out of her hood's confines like a pale golden snake uncoiling down her shoulder.
“You know how you're afraid I'm lying, and I'm going to betray you to the Chantry the first second I get?” Alistair finally said.
Jacinta didn't even try to deny it. She nodded, tucking her ragged hair neatly back inside her hood.
“I'm King Maric's son,” said Alistair, and Maker, how he hated the sound of it, how he hated his own voice and the abashed little laugh it added onto the end of that sentence, as if the sentence on its own weren't joke enough. “So if Teyrn Loghain or whoever is going after the Theirin bloodline, they've got to get me out of the way, too.”
Quite abruptly, he was no longer in the mood to talk about who he was or where he wanted to go, not least because he had no clue anymore. Templars were Chantry sons, so what did that make him? Disowned? Unwanted? Again? He yanked his pack over by its strings and shook off one glove so that he could dig around for his standard-issue bedroll.
There was a long, reeling pause before the mage spoke. “But,” said Jacinta, as though she were only now stating aloud some pack train of thought already far down the road, “but if you're the king's son, why are you a Templar?”
“Because he got me on a serving girl,” Alistair replied shortly. “He probably never knew I existed. I suppose they kept me around as a spare, figured to raise me up righteous, just in case. Must be why they fed me to the Chantry, since it sure wasn't because I wanted to go.” He tugged his bedroll free from the knapsack, tumbling half a dozen myriad personal accessories out along with it. Restraining himself from sighing hard enough to put the campfire out, he knelt to arrange his meager belongings. “Anyway, now you've got something on me, too. If you want me out of the way, get word to a Templar who I am and it's all done.”
“I wouldn't tell a Templar the way to the privy if they were about to explode.” Contrary to every expectation Alistair had of the mage girl, she was smiling again, that small crooked thing she hid away in shadow. “Jowan and I used to corner the new ones and give them all kinds of wrong directions, just so we could watch them try not to do the pee dance while standing guard over some dim-witted apprentice who couldn't direct a line between two points.”
That surprised a laugh out of Alistair, though it was odd thinking of a maleficar and an apostate sharing giggles over some childish prank. He supposed they were people, just children, before they were either of those, even if they were mages the whole time. Then he realized the division in thought he'd just made between people and mages, and ducked his head, grateful he hadn't spoken it aloud.
“I told him what happened in the capital, and then, when he told me his name, that the Chantry was searching for him,” Leliana said softly over Alistair's bowed head. “I was sorry to be the bearer of such bad news. But a Templar named Alistair? They always said of Maric that he was a golden king, so once I saw him, I felt certain.”
“I protest!” Alistair flushed, sweeping tiny statuettes back into his knapsack. He removed his other glove and stowed it away, then made a show of smoothing his bedroll. “There's other blonds in Ferelden.”
“Ah, but I doubt there's another blond Alistair in the whole Fereldan Order. It's not exactly a common name. Anyway,” said Leliana lightly, “your face when I asked you if you were the king's son was as clear and loud a 'yes' as I've ever seen.”
“It's been very hush-hush all my life. It's not really something I expect strangers to waltz up and ask me,” Alistair muttered.
Jacinta eyed him with cautious interest. “So it's Denerim for you, then?”
“I don't know.” Alistair began the lengthy process of unbuckling his cuirass, grateful for the mail shirt and smallclothes beneath. “Maybe. It's as good a place to go as any. I don't know what I'd even do there, other than walk into a Templar and blow the whole thing.”
“Maybe... maybe the Dalish would let you stay with them, for a little while, to give you time to think. You'd be safe there,” Jacinta said.
Alistair shrugged, the gesture serving both to get the bulk of the heavy Templar armor off him and to indicate his response. “I'll go with you as far as that if you like. At least if the Dalish shoot me on sight, I won't have to worry about that whole mess in the capital, right?”
“Let us hope we can pursue a more diplomatic course,” Leliana yawned. Her voice seemed to come from someplace different. When Alistair looked up, she had already ensconced herself in her bedroll, nothing but a thatch of scarlet hair spilling free.
Jacinta still sat by the fire, her face abstracted. Alistair shed the remainder of his armor and slid into his bedroll, not far from her. The lyrium sense within him glowed warm like the mud idol strung round his neck, a secret within his skin and without.
She felt so absurdly familiar. He hadn't had a spot of trouble locating her. Was it like this with all Templars, all mages? “When you're ready to sleep,” he told her softly, “wake me up and I'll take next watch.”
“Oh,” she murmured. “Yes. I hadn't even thought of that.”
He raised his gaze to hers, and it wandered to the tattoo on her face, black beneath her eye, a bold and sinuous line above, echoing the curve of her brow. The Circle did not stamp its mages so. “Fugitives on the run now, remember?”
“How could I forget?” she said bleakly. Alistair's answering smile was crimped with sympathy, and after a moment, she nodded and turned her face away again, the orb of her staff refracting firelight across the clearing's floor.
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